Florida-Based Beauty And Lifestyle Retailer Living With Ivey Eyes 5X Growth With New York Expansion
Living With Ivey is opening in the ritzy Long Island beach community Southampton this summer, with a second location following shortly behind in New York City’s Tribeca neighborhood in the fall.
The clean and sustainable beauty and lifestyle retailer, which currently has three locations in South Florida, carries over 180 beauty, wellness, personal care, baby, home, jewelry, apparel and food brands. Eighty percent are in the beauty and wellness categories. Among its bestselling brands are Augustinus Bader, Saint Jane Beauty, RMS Beauty, TOK Beauty, Doré, Arrae, Tronque, Facile, Sidia, Jolie and Cymbiotika. Across all categories, supplements, home fragrance, skincare and makeup products are the most popular with Living With Ivey shoppers.
This year, Living With Ivey projects its sales will multiply 5X largely due to founder, CEO and nutrition and hormone health coach Ivey Leidy’s audience on Instagram, where she shares fitness tips, beauty routines and product recommendations with her 72,400 followers. Last month, Leidy uploaded a video applying Goldfaden MD’s $95 serum Radiance Repair, and it sold out on Living With Ivey’s website within two hours and its store soon afterward.
“That is entirely because I have an open dialogue and I’ve earned this trust,” says Leidy. “I don’t bullshit them [my social media followers] on anything. These are all the things that I use and love, and I wouldn’t promote something that I didn’t think was top quality.”
Living With Ivey, which opened its Palm Beach flagship in 2023 before branching out to two Miami locations in the Coconut Grove and Sunset Harbor neighborhoods, has expansion beyond Florida and New York on its roadmap. It plans to open three stores a year in affluent residential areas of Dallas and suburbs such as Greenwich, Conn. The retailer is employing New York City commercial real estate advisory firm Newmark to assist with its expansion.
According to Leidy, Living With Ivey’s brick-and-mortar fleet is profitable. In the future, she strives to grow e-commerce sales to 80% of its total turnover. Today, brick-and-mortar and e-commerce sales are split almost evenly. Living With Ivey taps agencies KSJ Collective and David Pirotta to learn about new brands and source them for its assortment.
Chock-full of antiques, artwork and family heirlooms, its stores are designed to look like an extension of Leidy’s living room with couches, dressers and tables. She believes the non-traditional setting for retail has been helpful in drawing customers outside of Instagram. Leidy says, “In retail, the consumer is getting bored, and I think wants something more interesting, more engaging, more experiential and more fun.”
Leidy is launching a product line, Ivey, in July in Living With Ivey’s stores. It’s starting with a fragrance and two body oils priced at $195 and under. Inspired by an essential oils scent that Leidy has been mixing up at home for two decades, the fragrance will feature notes of lemon, coconut, jasmine and vanilla. The body oils contain 3% oil-soluble vitamin C to aid in collagen production and fine line reduction.
Ivey’s debut will be celebrated with an event at Living With Ivey’s forthcoming Southampton location and an overhaul of the retailer’s website. Digital advertising agency NetElixir is guiding the brand’s paid media strategies. Leidy expects to place Ivey in third-party distribution and also aims to establish a standalone brick-and-mortar business for the brand. She says, “Think of Aesop.”
A mother of three, Leidy became passionate about health and wellness after the birth of her first child 15 years ago. “In that moment, I was like, this is so much bigger, and I want to kind of heal myself for him,” says Leidy, who previously struggled with eating disorders. “I wanted to find out how to channel that energy into helping people, too.”
In 2010, Leidy founded Ivey Bakes, a bakery company that folded after her second and third children were born. Quarantined during the pandemic in 2020, she began posting cooking videos that evolved into lifestyle content. Living With Ivey now encapsulates that content in a retail environment.
Leidy manages 12 employees at the company, including corporate and non-corporate staff in warehousing and stores. Her husband, Bobby Leidy, founder and partner at hedge fund Teneo Capital Management, is the grandson of socialite-turned-fashion designer Lilly Pulitzer, who was heir to the Standard Oil fortune and married and divorced Peter Pulitzer, son of newspaper scion Joseph Pulitzer.
In addition to being Living With Ivey’s founder, CEO and product curator, Leidy is involved in backend functions for the business like e-commerce fulfillment and customer service—and doesn’t anticipate letting go of that role, even as its business scales. “I never want to be out of the customer service inbox. I never want to not know how something works within my company,” she says. “I might have to clone myself but I will always want to have intimate hands on every part of the business.”
