Entrepreneur Isabelle Ramsay-Brackstone has closed her new Palm Beach perfume store after only a few short months in operation. “The safety of our community is our No 1 priority,” said Ms Ramsay-Brackstone who runs Lili Bermuda Perfumery in Bermuda and Florida. “As such we are closing our Palm Beach store until further notice.”The Bermuda locations in Hamilton and St George, and Lili Bermuda’s online store, remain open. “Between now and Friday, we are offering free shipping on all orders, no minimum, so you can enjoy the scent of Bermuda from home,” Ms Ramsay-Brackstone wrote on her Facebook site. “We will continue to monitor the current situation to ensure we are best serving our customers and staff.”She opened Lili Bermuda Palm Beach in the exclusive Florida town of 8,400 permanent residents last autumn. Until the virus’ global outbreak the Palm Beach store was well received. “We have had some excellent press and we have done some cool events with locals,” she said. “I think everyone is very supportive of the product.”The store is located at 323 Worth Avenue, the Rodeo Drive of south Florida, and is very much a Bermuda store. There are photos of Gombeys and Bermuda architecture and inside the colour palette is Bermuda’s trademark pink and blue. Ms Ramsay-Brackstone said Palm Beachers are already very familiar with Bermuda as a destination. “They absolutely know where it is,” she said. “That being said it does raise the profile of Bermuda. Sometimes customers will say oh I was in Bermuda many years ago. It is a beautiful place. We should go back. That is very heart warming, for sure.”Before the coronavirus outbreak stemmed the world tourism tide, people who saw Lili Bermuda in Palm Beach, were regularly popping into the Bermuda stores. She started thinking about opening a store in Palm Beach while vacationing there in 2017.“Palm Beach is where I go to hide when I am not in Bermuda,” she said. “It is one of those little nuggets in south Florida that is very special.”She saw a lot of similarities between Palm Beach and Bermuda in terms of lifestyle, tourist clientele and climate, but one of the major differences is the seasonality of tourism.While things are normally pretty quiet in Bermuda at this time of year; it is the height of the tourist season in Palm Beach. “Florida is much more seasonal than Bermuda,” she said. “In the town of Palm Beach, 80 per cent of the population vanishes in the summer months due to the heat.”She said Palm Beach is very much a “second home kind of place” for a lot of Americans who live in the American northeast.“For tax reasons, a lot of people have their domicile in Florida, but they do live at least five months a year in the northeast in the summer time. Lots of people there will have a home in Palm Beach and one in New York or Boston and will vacation in Cape Cod, Massachusetts or Kennebunkport, Maine in the summer.”• Lili Bermuda has locations at 5 Queen Street in St George or at 67 Front Street in Hamilton. For more information call 293-0627, see www.lilibermuda.com or e-mail clientcare@lilibermuda.com