You know springtime is in the air when ladies are shedding layers and wriggling into lighter dresses and tops — and cries of “But what am I going to wear on my arms?” rise from Evie Lou’s fitting rooms.

The issue of bare arms is probably the most common one we hear about sleeveless dresses and tops. When I’m buying for the stores and website, the No. 1 thing I’m looking for is flattering, easy dresses with a bit of edge and with sleeves — and these are as hard to find as a crooked smile at the Oscars.

That’s one of the reasons we treasure designers such as Aimee G, who offers the option of adding a sleeve to most of her dresses and tanks for a modest additional charge. But a funny thing happens on the way to the cash register: It’s our experience that people will still buy sleeveless dresses, even when we provide an alternative.

Over the past four springs, we’ve routinely brought in the same Aimee G dresses in sleeved and sleeveless versions. We might change the color options or bring the pieces in at different times of the season, but essentially, we’re selling the same styles. And almost all of the time, the sleeveless ones sell faster. The same holds true with our other popular brands that offer a sleeve vs. no-sleeve option, such as Rundholz, Veronique Miljkovitch and Cut Loose.

Customers’ reasons for this? Read on:

— Sleeveless looks “springier” and “dressier.”

— Fit can be compromised when sleeves are attached to a garment. There’s more likelihood of pulling across the bust and shoulders with a set-in sleeve. Also, it’s easier to size down in a dress when you remove the arm/shoulder factor.

— Sleeves tend to make a garment appear visually “heavier” and thus “too hot” for some of our gals to wear in the warmer months… even if we gently point out that adding a top layer to cover their arms will be warmer than wearing one layer that includes fabric on the arms.

It’s a conundrum, to be sure. So many women won’t even consider a dress without sleeves, at least at first, yet don’t like their options for those with sleeves, dismissing what we have as being too hot, too unseasonal and too matronly. (Keep in mind, it’s often the same dress being compared, one with sleeves, one without.)

We’ve built up a decent collection of cover-up alternatives, from mesh boleros to lightweight cotton cardies to Sleevey Wonders (these are sleeved underpinnings that snap in front, right over the bra, sort of like a dickey for the arms), but every dress has different demands, and it can be really challenging to find the right piece for every look.  Often, the cover-up covers up what one actually likes about a dress!

I’m encouraged that more and more designers are beginning to offer cardies and cover-ups designed to go with their sleeveless pieces. And in the meantime, we’ll continue our little sleeve-vs.-no-sleeve experiment with the same dresses, the results of which play out in the next season’s buy.

Our beloved model, Skylar, is back in action! She was missing from our pages for several months last fall because she was planning her wedding.

Our photo shoots almost always happen on late Sunday afternoons, after the store closes — and as Skylar’s one day off a week is Sunday, she needed to spend it on far more important matters than the latest dress or tunic we wanted to photograph on her.

We have a modest little photo studio tucked way in the back of our Tremont store. The quarters are tight, and we move at a fast pace, so it’s important that we all get along.  Skylar is one of our all-time favorite people — as Tim-the-Photog says about her work, “She’s always at a party in her head.” Always upbeat, always positive, humming under her breath, utterly at ease in her own skin… yep, dammit, she’s the veritable cliche: As beautiful on the inside as she is on the outside. Sigh.

Thanks so much to everyone who took the time to send us feedback about Evie Lou’s recent website update! It’s a project that’s been long in the works.

For our first few years, our site was on the HipCommerce platform, which is quite basic and was developed with small retailers like us in mind. But that software was created 15 years ago, which is a lifetime in cyber years. Thus, it’s going the way of the steam engine (or the landline phone, the print newspaper, taxicabs, whatever the modern equivalent may be) and won’t continue to be supported by our hosts. Because we had to change anyway, we thought to make the shift a positive one, by adding features that customers had requested over the years.

So I sent a wish list of things I wanted to see on the revamped site to our developers, the patient folks at Modern Retail. Along the way, our “eight-week project” turned into an eight-month project, which was as frustrating as it sounds. But we wanted to get it right, and a lot of the features we wanted are those found on the big boys’ sites, such as Nordstrom.com or Anthropologie.com — chains with a lot more money and manpower at their disposal. But our development team did their absolute best to find or create enhancements for us that would work similarly to features on more lavish sites, but within our budget. This was an approach I could relate to — after all, it’s what we do all day in our stores for our customers. Not everyone has a Rundholz budget, but many have Rundholz taste.

While we had to give up some of our wish-list items, I’m very happy with the end result, and relieved that so many of the people who really matter (you know, actual customers!) are, too.

Inevitably, however, we’re all discovering various glitches as we work with the new site. Our developers and I are working to resolve them, but in the meantime, if you’ve encountered any of these issues, be assured that they’re real, and you’re not crazy:

• Internet Explorer: Brainy developer types don’t like this browser, and after this process, I see why. To borrow a phrase, it’s so glitchy.  Customers who are accessing the site on IE and trying to add a product to their shopping carts are finding that all sizes auto-default to a size XS.  We’re working on a fix, but in the meantime, the problem can be solved simply by using another browser, such as Google Chrome or Firefox. Or, just give us a call, and we can do the order over the phone!
• Overlapping features: When using the site on mobile phones and some laptops, folks are sometimes having trouble selecting the last size in the pull-down menu, as it sometimes overlaps the Cross-Sell feature below the menu. This is a CSS coding issue (I feel so smart when I throw around phrases like this, but honestly, I have no idea what that means!), which I’m told is a bit involved. Again, a fix is in the works.
• Filtering by size: I really wanted to have this useful feature on every collections catalog page, including clearance item pages, and it was a challenge for the developers to make happen. The good news is, that feature is now in place. The bad news is, it doesn’t work in real time, meaning that if a size Medium is sold out in a particular style, the item in that size will still show up in the filtered view because we did have it at one time. I’m pushing for a solution to this glitch, but for now, if we want the ability to filter at all — which we most certainly do — it’s something we have to live with. I’m sorry about it, and I’m really bummed, too. But nagging is a key component in my skill set, so I’ll stay on this like a bride at a Kleinfeld’s sample sale.

Again, thanks for your patience with us as we navigate the choppy waters of change. I’m going to get back to rowing.

XO, Kim