Fast Friends To Open Women’s Fashion Boutique Scout & Molly’s on Elm Street

Olivia Huvane and Amy Gray hit it off as soon as they met six years ago, as young professional women starting their families while commuting to Manhattan from Bronxville, N.Y.

The fast friends supported each other through childcare and career—Huvane raising two young boys while working in fashion, Gray with two girls, a hedge fund’s accountant manager. In December, months after Huvane lost her husband to cancer (“It was a turning point, a shift in priorities,” she said), the women began exploring the possibility of launching a business together, something neither had ever done. They researched online and discovered Scout & Molly’s, a unique woman’s fashion boutique franchising model that launched in 2002. “There is really no other boutique for women that is of this caliber, the quality and that we can select all of the clothes we carry,” Huvane said on a recent morning. “I worked in fashion for almost 15 years and I was really impressed and loved that we had a lot of creative control.