On a recent Friday morning, Tova Soto, a buyer and senior manager at Hirshleifers, arrived for work at 8 a.m., as soon as the store’s alarm system was turned off. She wanted several hours to prepare for a shopping visit from a longstanding customer, who was bringing along two friends.

Soto knew the sizes and tastes of each woman and canvassed the storeroom and store racks, handpicking an array of pants, shirts, dresses, coats and accessories. She and her assistant steamed and carefully hung the clothes -- selecting handbags, scarves, belts, jewelry and shoes to complete different outfits. The customers were ushered to spacious fitting rooms, where they each found themselves in “a store, within a store, designed just for them,” Soto said.

Stella McCartney

After spending three hours trying everything on, the women purchased a wardrobe full of clothes, including a gray Stella McCartney jacket for $1,935 and skinny gray pants for $800, a Brunello Cucinelli silver-trimmed cardigan for $2,745 and a $6,835 shearling coat and an Avant Toi top for $1,880. Two of the shoppers each purchased short gray suede Manolo Blahnik boots for $1,045 a pair.

Hirshleifers treated the women to lunch at Cipollini Trattoria, one of the mall’s two upscale restaurants. Like Toku Modern Asian restaurant a few yards away, Cipollini was packed. While the women ate lunch and visited with one another, Hirshleifers’ shoe salon stretched their new boots.

Like Soto, Americana’s Merollo is a combination personal shopper, stylist and therapist. She helped one customer furnish her home and buy a car, “because she trusts my taste,” traveled in September to Paris with another to see the fall fashion shows and once spent part of her own vacation in Italy searching for lace for a shopper.

Customer Handholding

“What I do most is listen, so I can figure out what a customer needs,” she said. Sometimes that’s a handbag and sometimes it’s handholding.

Jacki Rogoff has shopped at Americana for 25 years. Her favorite store is Hirshleifers, now managed by the founding family’s fifth generation. Rogoff, who runs a Long Island nonprofit, says buyer Lori Hirshleifer caters to her exacting tastes.

“You won’t find what they have in Saks Fifth Avenue, because they have close relationships with vendors so they get one-of-a-kind items,” said Rogoff, who recently purchased several pairs of Jon Buscemi leather sneakers, which sell for $865 and have golden padlocks dangling from the ankle straps.