Lisa Kline, long known among fashionable Angelenos for her retail prowess and celebrity clients, is trying out a new business model. She’s stepping away from brick-and-mortar stores and plunging into online shopping.

Kline will be the public face and chief fashion officer of new e-commerce company Vaniti.com.

The website, developed with financial backing from Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten Inc., aims to give fashion brands a risk-free opportunity to make more lucrative sales than they might otherwise be afforded through the traditional model of selling wholesale to retailers.

Kline first got involved with Vaniti in April after being approached by her tech-savvy friend Derek Wall. At that time, Kline had only one brick-and-mortar store on Robertson Boulevard.

At the height of her business, Kline had six high-end contemporary fashion boutiques that together brought in $12 million in annual revenue. But when Hollywood writers went on strike in 2007 and the economy faltered in 2008, sales at her shops plummeted 90 percent. Her stores, which sold clothing from multiple brands, struggled to compete with the growing number of rivals on the street that were devoted to selling only one brand and with the flash-sales website industry.

She closed her remaining store in December.

“The last store broke even but that wasn’t enough to make me want to stay,” Kline said. “I want to make money, not just spin my wheels. I know there are other ways to make money.”

Together Wall, Kline and another partner, Jeff Sherwood, worked to bring Vaniti to life.

Wall, chief executive of Vaniti, said the concept for the specialty online marketplace came about when he realized that there was no online space for high-end contemporary fashion brands to sell to consumers.

“These cool, high-end brands can’t sell on Amazon.com, they can’t sell on eBay.com, they can’t sell on Buy.com,” Wall said. The closest possibility is Etsy.com, but that site caters more to people selling homemade arts-and-crafts goods.

Developers for the Vaniti site will build an online “storefront,” or homepage, for each brand as part of a larger boutique marketplace. They will also film two-minute introduction videos to market each participating brand on the website. Brands will be responsible for their prices, sales and order fulfillment, and customers shopping on the site will get free shipping and returns. In exchange for all this, Vaniti will take a sales commission.

Kline said she will create a storefront on the website for her Lisa Kline-branded designer clothing line, but her responsibilities on the website go much further.

In her new role, Kline will screen all prospective fashion brands before they are allowed to sell on the website. She will also go through the thousands of products she expects to have featured on the site and highlight her favorites. She expects to sign up hundreds of brands that do everything from men’s or women’s clothing to lingerie, swimwear and even housewares. California Apparel News reported that L.A.-based contemporary brands Gypsy 05, Piper Gore and Sandast are among the brands that have already signed up.

Mark Douglas, president and chief executive of Culver City online retail marketing firm Steelhouse Inc., said Kline’s involvement is significant for Vaniti.

“She has customers that trust her,” Douglas said. “Now she’s saying, ‘I’m going to take what you like about me and I’m going to go out and find great designers and products and curate it.’ I think it’s pretty smart.”

Wall said he is hoping to launch the website in full in April, but that he won’t push it.

“We raised a lot of money for this company so we don’t want to just throw something out there that’s going to break,” he said. “So we’re going to launch it when we feel ready.”

Wall was founder and president of BuyNow.com, a division of Aliso Viejo online retailer Buy.com. In May 2010, Buy.com was sold to Rakuten for $250 million. Wall forged a business relationship with Rakuten then.

So far, Vaniti has just over a dozen employees, but plans to grow its staff many times over. The new e-commerce company has already cost millions of dollars to develop, but Wall said he anticipates Vaniti will eventually be a billion-dollar company.

Steelhouse’s Douglas said there’s an opportunity for growth.

“There’s a huge trend towards online buying,” he said. “People increasingly know what they want and they’re comfortable with the idea.”

Douglas said e-commerce sales are growing at a rate of about 25 percent year over year, and that online clothing sales are approaching 10 percent of a $300 billion worldwide market.

Jeff Sherwood, chief brand officer for Vaniti, said the company also plans to develop mobile applications to complement the website.

“Mobile has been superhot lately,” he said. “We imagine that we could probably even get up to half our business through mobile applications.”