Top Hat Wouldn’t Exist if It Weren’t For a Nepalese Airline Lottery
Manhattan, NY – Top Hat is one of the Lower East Side’s least predictable stores. The retail outlet of wholesale company Sweet Bella, it stocks gifts like hyper-accurate bird calls and packaged Finnish “snowballs” alongside hard-to-find stationery items like printed masking tape. Last week, owner Nina Allen told us all about how she came to find herself selling quirky dry goods on Broome Street. It’s a story that starts halfway around the world, on an airplane in Nepal.
What made you want to own a store?
It sort of opened itself. We have a wholesale company, so we had a lot of stock on hand. We walked by the storefront one day and saw a “for rent” sign. It’s a beautiful block, one of my favorites in the city. I called the number on the sign and basically rented it the next day.
We rented it in November of 2010 and opened a month later. So it’s been a year and a half. It took us a while. In the beginning we only operated out of the front room, but then we opened the back room too. It wasn’t fully open until November of last year.
