At the entrance of Cadeau Boutique and Gallery, Sera Petras shows off her inventory of accessories and stationery before making her way to the back, where shoes and sweaters are on sale.
For half a decade, Petras has rotated through selling a variety of sustainable and ethical products, but her career in fashion began much earlier than that.
Before Petras, 46, spent her days splitting her time between Cadeau’s Brookline and South End storefronts, she was climbing up the fashion corporate ladder in Chestnut Hill.
After losing her job at an art gallery, the Massachusetts native found a place at Portobello Road in 2007, where she spent 13 years learning the ropes of managing a boutique.
Portobello Road, a Newton shop named after the English street market, was her first taste of what it meant to run a business.
When Portobello Road closed its doors in 2020, Petras saw an opportunity to hone in on her sustainable ideals and bring them to a new community in Brookline. Cadeau, located at 214 Washington Street in Brookline Village, is a lifestyle boutique that sells handmade and ethically-made products ranging from clothing, home decor and jewelry to body care.
“I feel a responsibility to source items that pay attention to climate change,” Petras said. “At this point, there’s absolutely no denying we’re in a climate crisis, so it felt like my responsibility. A lot of customers don’t care, but I’m making that decision for them.”
Those decisions can take work. Petras travels to New York for trade shows and researches international companies. A significant part of Petras’ sustainable practices comes from European influences.
“They’re just so much more conscious in Europe in general. It’s just second nature, which is kind of what I’m trying to embody,” Petras said. “I have to be more mindful because there are a lot of people who don’t care about sustainability.”
Brodie, one of the clothing brands she sells in the stores, is an England-based cashmere company certified by the Sustainable Fibre Alliance, an organization dedicated to reducing the environmental impact of cashmere and other animal fibers.
“If I’m going to promote consumerism, I have to be providing products that I can stand behind and that I don’t feel are adding more to landfills,” Petras said. “Of course, there’s still going to be some of that here, but at least I can say I really tried.”
Fast fashion which produces clothing cheaply and quickly, is one of the leading contributors to climate change. Petras is trying to embrace the opposite, what she calls “slow fashion.”
One brand embodying slow fashion in her store is Paychi Guh, a cashmere company that uses natural fibers and sources goats from Mongolia. “The fibers come from little baby goats that are treated like princes on this farm in Inner Mongolia, where it’s cold. You look at their website, and it’s just ethics, ethics, ethics.”
Goats three to eight months old are gathered in the spring. Afterwards, the collected fibres go through a cashmere manufacturing process that is organically certified by ECOCERT.
Some of the brands sold at Cadeau are participants of the Global Organic Textile Standard, otherwise known as GOTS, a program dedicated to promoting ethical processing standards for organic textiles such as cotton.
To Petras, it’s all about transparency between her and the companies she works with.
“I’m offering hospitality to my guests here, but [the suppliers] are offering hospitality to me. If I don’t feel that kind of partnership with them and I don’t feel like their values align with mine, it’s not a good fit even if the product is amazing,” she said.
Petras saw quick success when Cadeau opened, but the pandemic was difficult, as foot traffic dropped.
Sales began to stabilize in the summer of 2022. “I would love to say there is big growth, but we’re mostly even with the past two years,” she said.
Petras was able to successfully open up a second storefront in the South End in 2023. The South End location is open Wednesday through Saturday, while the Brookline location operates Monday through Saturday.