Most prom shops sell you a gown and then send you somewhere else to have it fitted. This one starts from the other end. The business at 370 Franklin Ave is a sewing and alterations shop that also sells formal gowns, and its Facebook page states plainly that there is a professional seamstress on site. The state of Connecticut classifies the company under cut-and-sew apparel manufacturing, not retail, which is a fair description of the order of operations here.
A note on the name before anything else. Directory listings carry it several ways — Naomi Sewing, Noemi Sewing & Alterations, Noemí Fashion & Alterations. The Connecticut business registry has NOEMI & SEWING & ALTERATIONS LLC at this address, registered in October 2020, with Lilian N. Quevedo Cachay listed as an officer. The phone number is the same across all of them: (860) 992-6102. There is no website on file, and the shop’s public presence is a Facebook page that posts largely in Spanish.
What’s on the racks
Two labels are confirmed through the manufacturers’ own retailer locators: House of Wu and Tiffany Designs. That pairing tells you something about the customer base. Tiffany Designs is a prom and pageant house. House of Wu is broader — the company says it carries 19 designer labels spanning bridal, bridesmaids, mother of the bride, prom, pageant and quinceañera. A small shop that stocks both is not running a prom-only operation. It is covering prom, quinceañera, sweet sixteen and weddings out of one storefront, which is exactly what the shop describes itself as doing.
That is not a marketing angle on Franklin Avenue, it is the arithmetic of the block. The avenue was Hartford’s Little Italy, settled by families who moved south after the 1930s floods and the demolition of the Front Street neighborhood for Constitution Plaza in 1962. The Italian bakeries and markets are still there. So are Peruvian, Colombian and Puerto Rican restaurants, several of them within a few doors of number 370. A quinceañera dress and a prom dress are both regular Saturday business in a shop on this street.
Who shops here
Bulkeley High School sits in the same 06114 ZIP code, about a mile away on Wethersfield Avenue; its students returned to the renovated building there in January 2026 after the district finished the work. Franklin Avenue runs south to the Wethersfield town line, which puts Wethersfield High School and its roughly 1,100 students a short drive from the door. Hartford’s magnet and neighborhood high schools are all inside a few miles, and downtown is about three.
The nearest comparable option is Casa Tony, roughly two miles west at 1810 Park St, which also carries House of Wu and also does alterations in house. If you are choosing between them, the deciding factors are stock on the day you walk in and how quickly someone can get to your hem.
Before you go
- Call first. With no website and no published stock list, the phone is how you find out what is in the store and in your size.
- Spanish is spoken here. The shop’s own posts are in Spanish.
- Bring your shoes. Alterations happen on the premises, and a hem is only correct at one heel height.
- Franklin Avenue is a street-parking commercial strip, not a mall lot. Plan for that on a Saturday afternoon in April.
Connecticut proms cluster in May, which means the fitting queue at every alterations shop in Hartford County tightens through April. A shop that sells the dress and sews it is worth reaching earlier rather than later for that reason alone.