News
BISNOW EXCLUSIVE: LUXURY RETAIL'S MISTRESSES
January 25, 2012
| Bisnow got exclusive access to CBRE brokers from around the country and retailers from around the world at the firm's NYC 2012 Retail Forum. (We're ready for Fashion Week now!) What we learned: Luxury retailers love jeans (excuse us ... denim) as business wear. Also, NYC may be their first pick, but we're not their one and only. |
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| Links of London and Folli Follie's Joe Adelantar (with Henri Bendel prez Chris Fiore and Eataly's Adam Saper) says North America is underrepresented in its portfolio and so is actually a growth market. It's starting in SoHo, but you can't do just Manhattan he says. Next up is proving the brand in department stores in, say, Short Hills, NJ. (f you can make it there, you can make it anywhere.) Chris says Henri Bendel's budget for a SoHo store was 40% higher than the $700 or $800 per SF set aside for a mall store. Adam says that while another New York location is as tempting as Eataly's pizza, other cities are next on the to-do list: Chicago, DC, LA, maybe San Fran. |
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| 34th Street Partnership's Dan Biederman says a 30k SF expansion to Victoria's Secret's 20k SF at 34th and 6th is under construction— the store is taking over a multi-level garage at 35th and 6th. (Maybe now Men's Wearhouse will finally get the courage to ask Victoria's Secret for a date.) Five new stores came to 34th between 5th and 6th last year (Uniqlo, Mango, Levi's, Timberland, and a co-branded Foot Locker/House of Hoops). It all adds up to 95% occupancy between 5th and 8th avenues. The busiest sidewalk in December was in front of 450 7th Ave, where LIRR riders merge with those exiting Penn Station at 32nd Street, peaking at 13,400 pedestrians in its best hour. And then there's the 20 million visitors to Macy's each year. Dan reports his wife and 20-year-old daughter love the sales staff, who "make you aware of every discount available." |
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| Robinson Hernandez of the Office of the Mayor's New Business Acceleration Team says Manhattan is seeing fewer stores open but in larger footprints. The story in the outer boroughs is 42% growth in food and beverage. Robinson's group offers free, customized help for new retail businesses to launch citywide but is also trying to simplify the standard process. It helped 570 restaurants open in 2011, including turning around the paperwork for the Battery Park Steak 'n Shake in five days. |
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| Times Square Alliance's Ellen Goldstein says 350,000 people pass through Times Square daily. We're not sure whether those pedestrians or the 18-hour shopping day are the chicken or the egg. Either way, Forever 21 stays open til 2am, and it pulled in $90M in its first six months. Of the 600 stores between Broadway and 7th and 42nd and 47th streets, only 23 are vacant. Ellen says area residents and employees have $1.1B of spending power, and $320M of it is being missed from the dip in food offerings (though we maintain M&M's are the fifth primary food group). |
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| We sat next to Geox Respira's Marco Scatto, whose business technology development director title looks way cooler on the Italian-language side of his business card: direttore ingegneria dei processi di business. He says e-commerce for his shoe brand needs to be a repetition of the store experience, but you can't "give away the store" online. Geox Respira does e-commerce in the US and is launching it globally. Interestingly, returns of online purchases are low, indicating that online Geox shoppers are return customers who already know the brand and their sizes. |
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| We also snapped Magnolia Bakery founder Steve Abrams. He owns seven stores in the US and is franchising abroad: Dubai, Qatar, Lebanon, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Malaysia, Mexico... there were more, but our brain exploded before our pen could catch up. |
