In 2021, Jan Weiss started telling her staff she was thinking about retiring. She had run Berta Sawyer by herself for two decades, after two more decades working alongside her mother. What happened next is the most useful thing to know about the store: her seamstress, Lela, asked to buy it. Lela’s daughter Sara came into the sales floor in September 2021 to learn the front of the house, and on July 29, 2022, ownership passed to their company, L&S Boutique LLC, with Lela running the sewing room and Sara managing the store.
So the person who owns this shop is the person who takes in the seams. If you are shopping for a prom dress and you have been told at other stores that alterations are “handled off-site,“ that difference is the whole point of coming here. The fitting is not an afterthought bolted onto the sale; it is the business the current owner came from. The store describes its alterations staff as experienced European-trained seamstresses who finish an outfit before it leaves the building.
The store’s own history goes back further than either family. In 1972, the original Berta Sawyer asked a customer named Lorna Cohen whether she wanted to buy the business. Cohen did, her daughter Jan joined her in 1980, and the family held it for more than fifty years. Both the storefront and the website lead with a Best of Philadelphia nod for evening gowns.
Where it sits
306 Old York Road, between Greenwood and West Avenues, in the stretch of business district that sits at the top of the hill at Old York and West — the part of the borough locals call Uptown. This is Route 611. Jenkintown itself is small in a way that matters here: 0.58 square miles, about 4,500 residents, incorporated in 1874, and squeezed between Abington and Cheltenham Townships in Montgomery County. Park in the private lot behind the store and walk in from West Avenue rather than circling York Road for a space.
Because the borough is that small, the store’s prom traffic cannot come from Jenkintown alone. The whole school district is two buildings and roughly 710 students across K–12. The prom business here comes from the townships that ring it — Abington Senior High, Cheltenham, Upper Dublin, Abington Friends — and from families already driving the York Road corridor for something else.
What’s on the racks
Two prom-relevant labels are confirmed on the brands’ own retailer lists:
- Jovani
- Mac Duggal
Worth knowing: L & H Bridal Shoppe at 325 York Road, a short walk up the same street, is also a listed Jovani retailer. If a specific Jovani style is not in the room at 306, it is not a second trip across the county to ask.
Berta Sawyer is not a prom-only store, and a teenager shopping here should expect that. Its listings describe daywear, suits, cocktail wear and coats alongside the evening gowns, and the occasions it names for itself run to weddings, charity events, and bar and bat mitzvahs. A younger shopper is walking into a salon that dresses adults, with a sewing room that can make an adult-cut gown fit her.
Before you go
Appointments are required — this is not a store to drop into on a Saturday afternoon. Hours are Monday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Call (215) 572-8826.