The New York-based buyers from Bloomingdale’s have been spending a lot of time in California lately.

Since they opened to bell-ringing business about two years ago, sales at the chain’s four Southern California locations have been good, but not great, according to store executives. So as Bloomies’ third holiday season on the West Coast approaches, the store is working to fine tune its merchandise more closely to the preferences of Southern Californians.

And that means learning more about local tastes.

“What we’ve done in the last three to four months is increase our learning curve,” said Michael Gould, the department store’s chairman and chief executive. “As we’ve tweaked our assortments, business is getting stronger.”

The chain’s 1996 opening in Southern California was marked by a number of successful, high-profile charity events that brought in huge numbers of shoppers and raised expectations.

Since then, however, things have returned to business as usual.

“We haven’t seen a significant change (in customer traffic),” said Ali Hashemian, president of California Orchards, which has a store in Sherman Oaks Fashion Square. “We were surprised. We were expecting more.”

The chain’s best-performing store has been in Century City, where it replaced a Broadway, according to Gould and officials at the Century City Shopping Center & Marketplace.

“The store is doing way over double what Broadway did,” said Linda Smith Frost, marketing manager for the center. She noted that Century City is the No. 1 volume store for Bloomingdale’s outside New York.

Customer traffic at the mall has increased 3 percent to 4 percent since Bloomingdale’s opened, Frost added.

Frost believes Century City shoppers are probably more willing to embrace Bloomie’s than shoppers in some other location, noting that the Westside has a lot of ex-New Yorkers, as well as business people who travel frequently to the East Coast.

Elsewhere, however, the retailer’s performance has not been as strong.

“They created an enormous stir when they first opened, but since then you have not continued to hear the level of excitement,” said Richard Giss, a partner in the trade retail services group of Deloitte & Touche LLP. “They’re a player, but they’re not blowing away the competition.”

Gould said that part of the problem stems from the early results, which unrealistically raised expectations.

“We opened up in a blaze of glory, and like everything else, it settled down to more normal levels,” he said. “What we’re experiencing now is some good business, some outstanding business in a number of areas. Overall, we’re on plan.”

Still, he concedes that Bloomingdale’s has missed the mark with some of its selections, and the store has been working to change that.

This holiday season, Southern California shoppers can expect to see lighter-weight fabrics and a more colorful assortment of clothes. “You’ll see less black,” Gould said. “We are putting much more color in the assortments, and we’re seeing results.”

Matching its assortments to local tastes is particularly important for Bloomingdale’s, analysts said. The store doesn’t always compete on price against rivals like Macy’s and Robinsons-May, both of which promote sale prices heavily in newspaper ads. That means Bloomingdale’s has to rely on its merchandise to succeed.

“They’ve got to have merchandise that’s responsive to the California market,” said Giss.

Even with the in-house expertise of a number of top store executives who have lived in Southern California (Gould himself is a former Bullock’s executive), adapting to local tastes has not been easy.

“When you’re buying for stores all over the country, I think it is a little more difficult,” Gould said.

Bloomingdale’s has had to adapt not only to the differences between shoppers in New York and Southern California, but also to differences among Southern California shoppers. Tastes within the New York area do not vary much from Manhattan to Long Island, but that’s not the case in Southern California, where, Gould said, there can be significant style swings in style between Sherman Oaks and the Beverly Center.

“That’s the thing that surprised our organization, that stores relatively close to each other have distinct personalities,” Gould said.

He said research shows that customers come to Bloomingdale’s almost exclusively because of its reputation for fashion. “No other store do they say that about,” he adds.

To help get its fashionable message across, the store for the first time is going to be inserting its fall catalog into some local newspapers. “I think some of the changes will bode well,” Gould said.

To better understand the needs of the individual stores, Bloomingdale’s buyers and merchandise managers also have increased the time they spend in L.A., not only at the stores here, but at the local merchandise markets as well.

In July, the Fashion Square store hosted a Sherman Oaks Homeowners Association party that helped neighbors get acquainted with the operation, said Richard Close, president of the association.

“What we found was, before the event, most people figured it was a high-prestige, New York store,” Close said. “The event made them feel it was more like their community store.” Partygoers spent some $42,000 on purchases during the dinner and dance event.