Guided tours of Rockefeller Center don’t usually start with cocktails and bar snacks at the upscale French restaurant Le Rock. Nor do they typically end with pasta and a 30-layer chocolate cake at Jupiter, a popular Italian restaurant at the plaza in Midtown Manhattan.
But Beverly Nguyen, who led a group around Rockefeller Center on a recent Tuesday evening, is not your standard tour guide. For the group of marketing and public-relations executives from brands like Ralph Lauren, Cartier and Versace that she was showing around, Ms. Nguyen had arranged access to some “special spaces,” she said, while standing in front of Isamu Noguchi’s plaque sculpture “News,” carved into the facade of one of the plaza’s Art Deco-style buildings.
Though not a household name, Ms. Nguyen, 33, has, through a multi-hyphenate career, made a name for herself in various industries.
She is a fashion stylist and consultant who has worked with clothing brands like Kallmeyer and magazines like HommeGirls. She is the living editor at Family Style, a quarterly food and culture magazine. She is the owner of a home-goods store, Beverly’s, and became the first Asian American woman to have a shop at Rockefeller Center when she opened a Beverly’s pop-up in the plaza in 2021. (It has since moved to a permanent location on Orchard Street on the Lower East Side, not far from where Ms. Nguyen lives in Dimes Square, a neighborhood buzzing with young creative types.)
In 2022, Ms. Nguyen appeared on the cover of New York magazine’s annual “Reasons to Love New York” issue along with 71 other New Yorkers, the artist Alex Katz and the model Emily Ratajkowski among them.
This year, Ms. Nguyen was hired by Tishman Speyer, the real estate firm that owns Rockefeller Center, as an adviser on projects at the plaza involving brand activations with social media and hospitality components. She is among the latest in a string of local culture shapers — Le Rock’s chef-owners Lee Hanson and Riad Nasr; the J. Crew-executive-turned-reality-star Jenna Lyons; the Pebble Bar guys — tapped in recent years to burnish the image of the 85-year-old plaza.
“If you live in New York, you know that you can find Beverly at every cool party because she is impossibly cool herself,” said Ms. Lyons, who began working as a retail consultant at Rockefeller Center in 2020 and was involved in bringing the pop-up location of Beverly’s to the plaza.
As Ms. Nguyen led her tour group onto Radio Park, an eerily tranquil, half-acre lawn on the roof of Radio City Music Hall, she recalled coming to 30 Rockefeller Plaza, the building better known as 30 Rock, while working as an assistant to the stylist Kate Young. Ms. Nguyen said she “got to see all its underpinnings” when Ms. Young helped her celebrity clients get ready for segments on “The Tonight Show” and other TV appearances.
Ms. Nguyen’s tour was one of many engagements on her schedule that week. In the days after, she had a photo shoot for Family Style and a party for the release of the magazine’s latest issue. She had to go to East Hampton, on Long Island, to attend a store opening for the brand Veronica Beard, and to another event for the Maidstone Hotel. She had to review packaging for new products — a fragrance and candles — being introduced at Beverly’s. And she was organizing a party at her store for the release of new glassware by Saint Heron, the creative agency founded by Solange Knowles, sold at Beverly’s.
“Beverly is constantly doing a million things,” said Joshua Glass, the founder and editor in chief of Family Style. He met Ms. Nguyen socially, but could not remember exactly through whom. “If you’re working in all these spaces, of course you’re going to find synergies,” he said. “And she does.”
Both Mr. Glass and Ms. Nguyen are children of Vietnamese immigrants, and he said their upbringings instilled in each a similar drive. Ms. Nguyen said a “just do it” attitude was intrinsic to Vietnamese culture: “You roll up your sleeves and just get it done.”
Ms. Nguyen grew up the middle child in a family of three daughters in Orange County, Calif., where her parents had started a clothing manufacturing business after coming to the United States from Vietnam with few resources in the 1970s. Her elder sister, Linda Hull, a dental hygienist in Southern California, said Ms. Nguyen demonstrated a knack for multitasking at a young age.
“The moment she could walk, she was always doing a little bit of everything and trying to excel in it,” Ms. Hull said.
Ms. Nguyen’s exposure to clothing through her parent’s business fostered an early interest in fashion. In high school, she worked at a Banana Republic store and was involved in a surf-wear-themed fashion show organized by the brand Hurley before moving to San Francisco to attend Academy of Art University. She spent the summer before her senior year of college as an intern at Vogue in New York.
“I got in at 7:30, I left at 7:00,” said Ms. Nguyen, whose internship mostly involved working with the beauty department and managing the closet of sample products.
When Ms. Nguyen was offered a chance to extend her Vogue internship, she stayed in New York and completed her bachelor’s degree remotely. After Vogue came jobs at stores including Opening Ceremony, where she did makeup for e-commerce photo shoots, and La Garçonne, where Ms. Nguyen met Ms. Young, the stylist, through a friend.
Ms. Young, also a Vogue alum, remembered Ms. Nguyen as someone with almost limitless energy. “She doesn’t really get tired,” Ms. Young said. “And I tire people out.”
Working with Ms. Young, whose clients at the time included the actresses Michelle Williams and Sienna Miller, “opened so many doors — just an insane amount,” Ms. Nguyen said. The job also involved traveling around the world, giving Ms. Nguyen opportunities to scour shops and pharmacies abroad for products — stationery, pantry goods, quirky bandages — that she could share with loved ones.
“When I got back from a trip, that’s the No. 1 thing I’d do,” Ms. Nguyen said. “I’d land and text like five friends to come over.”
Her interest in merchandise was inspired by her maternal grandmother, who owned a hardware store in Vietnam that sold what Ms. Nguyen described as an eclectic but useful array of kitchen supplies and other household items. Ms. Nguyen had often thought about following in her family’s entrepreneurial footsteps and opening a business of her own, she said, and her time working with Ms. Young helped hone her sensibility as a merchant.
“Part of doing the celebrity styling stuff only sharpened my tools, my interest in home and design,” she said.
Ms. Nguyen opened the first Beverly’s store on the Lower East Side in April 2021. It carried a trim selection of artisanal crafts and pantry items — ceramics, small-batch olive oil, towels developed with her parents — along with inexpensive cooking tools like woks and steam baskets that she bought from kitchen-supply stores in nearby Chinatown, many of which had been struggling financially because of the pandemic.
“I went door to door in Chinatown, to every restaurant supply store because I knew the restaurants were closed, so they weren’t reordering,” Ms. Nguyen said.
The arrival of the Beverly’s store downtown came as Ms. Lyons, as a recently appointed retail consultant for Rockefeller Center, was looking for small, local and minority-owned businesses that could broaden the shopping landscape at the midtown plaza. In June 2021, about two months after Ms. Nguyen had opened her first store, the Beverly’s Rockefeller Center pop-up shop opened for a five-month run. That fall, the business received more exposure when it temporarily took over a chunk of floor space in the homewares section at Nordstrom’s flagship store in Manhattan.
Olivia Kim, the vice president of creative projects at Nordstrom, who organized its partnership with Beverly’s, hadn’t previously met Ms. Nguyen. But both women had worked at Opening Ceremony, and Ms. Kim said Ms. Nguyen had been on her radar — or in her “zeitgeist,” as she put it. “I’m sure she’s in a lot of people’s zeitgeists, because of all the things she touches,” Ms. Kim said.
Ms. Kim, who is also Asian American, added that she appreciated how, as a merchant, Ms. Nguyen “was thinking about her family, her cultural roots around cooking, and bringing in all of those things that had a lot of nostalgia, but then adding in other goods.”
Alissa Bersin, the managing director of leasing retail at Tishman Speyer, who was involved in opening the Beverly’s pop-up at Rockefeller Center and in giving Ms. Nguyen her role as an adviser on projects at the plaza, said she has a knack for creating environments that “bring people together and make them feel good.”
As Mr. Glass of Family Style put it: “She connects people.”
That was true by the end of Ms. Nguyen’s recent Rockefeller Center tour, when the participants sat for a family-style dinner at Jupiter. As they chatted and gossiped over plates of pasta and grilled fish, the atmosphere seemed less like a work event and more like a night out with friends.
Shaye Vercollone, the vice president of communications at Theory and Helmut Lang, described the vibe in three words that she said could also be used to describe Ms. Nguyen: unique, eclectic and fun.
“Only Beverly can get 25 fashion people to Rockefeller Center on a 90-degree day and make it an absolute blast,” she said.
