The Cut Magazine on Flying Solo Retail Store
The Store (It Would Seem) Is Not Dead (At Least For Now)
The Cooperative Model: Team Up With 69 Other Designers
The Store (It Would Seem) Is Not Dead (At Least For Now)
Amazon isn’t going anywhere, so shops that would rather not shut down are adapting, resulting in a somewhat surprising retail renaissance.
By CARL SWANSONPhotographs And Interactive Tours By ANDREA FREMIOTTI
Roman and Williams Guild.
It’s the last day of April, a chill still in the air, and Michael Goldban, head of retail leasing at Brookfield Properties, wants to take a stroll down the pristinely blighted western terminus of Bleecker Street. Wearing Dolce & Gabbana transition glasses and a black blazer (and trailed by a publicist), he’s here to tell me why he’s an optimist about brick-and-mortar retail. We’re passing empty storefront after empty storefront, including one, at No. 359, that is asking $25,000-a-month rent; it features a dozen loaves of Wonder Bread dangling in its window like Pop Art sausages, presumably to attract the attention of whimsy-minded potential tenants. But Goldban sees “opportunity” in the tidy, bougie desolation of this post-Amazon streetscape.The company he works for owns dozens of malls and office buildings worldwide, among them the former World Financial Center, opened as the luxury mall Brookfield Place after 9/11. The week before, the firm placed a comparatively smaller bet on Bleecker, buying seven “cool and charming,” mostly vacant storefronts — and, by the way, he says, it’s in the market for more. Goldban regales me with how the company will apply the “place-making” and “activation” strategies that it believes it has perfected at Brookfield to revive Bleecker’s “mispriced assets.” The idea is to position the street as a place to spend the day, as he says, with Brookfield orchestrating the consumer experience rather than allowing each individual shop to pursue its own agenda. Put less delicately: “Let’s look at this as if it’s a mall, even though it’s not,” he says.
Goldban aims to seed this mall-but-not-mall with incubator retail that he then hopes to scale up. One of the first stores that has decided to give Bleecker a go is shoe start-up Margaux, a digital darling in need of a physical space to hashtag. “Listen, if Louis Vuitton came to us tomorrow and said, ‘We have this new idea, and we want to do it here,’ great. But what we really want it to be is a hub for innovation. And because the spaces are small, they don’t require much capital.”To make Bleecker feel more like a “destination,” Goldban is conferring with Brookfield’s “arts and events” team. He’s not thinking “street fairs” or “tchotchke sellers,” he hastens to add. “In London, there was a flower show that took over a street — something like that. Something tasteful.”
Bleecker has not been alone in its emptiness over the past few years. The number of vacant — and long vacant — storefronts in otherwise safe-and-prosperous New York is unsettling. “It kind of makes you scared for the city, which is geared around pedestrian life,” says former City Planning commissioner Amanda Burden, who can’t understand how landlords can leave the shops along Madison Avenue near her apartment lying fallow. One broker I spoke to, Bruce Ehrmann, said there are about 100 empty storefronts in Tribeca. When Manhattan borough president Gale Brewer sent a team up Broadway last year to count the empties, it got up to 188 — and she and Mayor Bill de Blasio are working on legislation to tax or fine landlords who don’t rent their places already. Cushman & Wakefield’s MarketBeat report for the first quarter of this year put the “availability” rate on Fifth Avenue between 42nd and 49th Streets at 32.8 percent, in Soho at 23.9 percent, and in Herald Square at 31.Maybe because the real-life writer Jane Jacobs, author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, and the made-up writer Carrie Bradshaw, heroine of Sex and the City, have both strolled Bleecker (undoubtedly in very different footwear), the fate of this little street has become a sort of real-estate morality tale over the past couple of years. (There’s an entire chapter devoted to it in Jeremiah Moss’s book Vanishing New York.)
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The Strange State of New York’s Street-Level Retail StorefrontsThe Best of New York Shopping 2018Bleecker’s mid-aughts transformation from a place to buy vintage quilts and Afghan rugs to an Edward Hopper version of Rodeo Drive was shocking for many New Yorkers — Marc Jacobs opened six shops over four blocks; Coach, side-by-side boutiques; Burberry, Brooks Brothers Black Fleece, Juicy Couture, Mulberry, and Lulu Guinness showed up too. The street became trendy, and the rents jumped, and while it worked for some brands for a while — the Michael Kors on the corner of Perry was said to be doing $3 million a year in its heyday roughly five years ago — many of them didn’t do enough business to justify keeping the lights on. In fact, every one of the aforementioned boutiques has closed.
The lone survivor is Bookmarc, which replaced the 24-year-old Biography Bookshop, to much gnashing of teeth, in 2010.“We keep hearing these narratives about the retail apocalypse, and clearly you have to be blind to not see that there have been major disruptions,” Goldban admits. Elsewhere in the city, the lingering bust can be attributed to the fact that chain retailers drove up rents over the past decade — filling the city with, as the authenticity Cassandras always put it, drugstores and Starbucks (along with plenty of banks) — but then, with sales being siphoned off by online outlets, couldn’t afford the increases they’d wrought. As noted in the Center for an Urban Future’s annual mall-ification tally (its first report, in 2008, was titled “Attack of the Chains?”), 20 percent of national retailers in the city closed stores over the past year, and only one in seven of the establishments the group follows “increased its footprint — the smallest share since we began keeping track a decade ago.”“We had ten years of an up-market, and rents were off the charts everywhere, absolutely everywhere,” says veteran Douglas Elliman broker Faith Hope Consolo. But that is starting to change. This most adaptive of cities is beginning to … adapt. “We had to give landlords a wake-up call,” Consolo says.
“On Madison in the 60s, it was $2,200 a foot. Today, you can make deals at $1,000 and $1,200 a foot.”The new retail beginning to rise is, like the rest of our lives, mediated by the digital: shops without shopping bags that act as showrooms for products you have to order later online; stores as places to hang out and drink coffee, maybe pick up a set of millennial-pink dinner plates or sniff a candle, and then Instagram that you were there. There are stores set up as playgrounds of hashtag zones (Philipp Plein on Mercer, with its parked Ferrari and neon signs blaring hipper-than-thou epigrams like your comfort zone will kill you); stores as community centers for your chosen community (Rough Trade records in Williamsburg, Books Are Magic in Cobble Hill); stores as Etsy-souks of artisanal products (Canal Street Market); high-tech stores where you can ogle robot legs wearing sneakers and shoot hoops (the Nike store in Soho); stores that peddle a sense of in-the-know scarcity (line up for the latest shoe to drop at Kith!). Then there are those that cater to the crazily exacting needs of busy, busy, busy, cost-is-no-object Miranda Priestlys.
The supercharged-concierge approach is part of the plan for both the seven-level Hudson Yards mall (with Neiman Marcus on top) and the 320,000-square-foot Nordstrom on 57th Street, which is slated to open next year.That’s the big hope for the city, that digital-first retailers — Bonobos, Everlane, even Amazon — will keep going IRL.In other words, with the old models for retail broken, or at least a good deal less sturdy, and rents finally in decline, risks are being taken. That willingness to experiment means that certain seemingly threatened — but perhaps more resilient than imagined — retailers such as bookstores are returning in new forms. Shakespeare & Co. is opening four stores, but they’re much smaller than the old ones, only 2,000-to-3,000 square feet, because new technology allows books to be printed and bound while you wait, minimizing the need for shelf space.This move toward experimentation is epitomized by the here-and-gone pop-up shop, what the brokerage CBRE calls “rogue retail.” A U.K. company named Appear Here is running what is essentially an Airbnb for pop-ups and has put its distinctive stickers on unoccupied storefronts all over town (one on the corner of Bleecker and Christopher rents for $1,250 a day).With city leases drastically shorter than they once were — down to an average of five years, versus as long as 20 in the 1990s — CBRE predicts that the temporary will become the permanent state of things. Our attention spans are shorter, after all. And yet, as Consolo points out, a fair number of the pop-ups are sticking around. Digital-native brands “test the concept,” she says, “and end up staying.”That’s the big hope for the city, that digital-firsters — Bonobos, Everlane, even Amazon — will keep going IRL. Several trends bode well for that: In the first six months of 2017, Facebook’s ad rates reportedly more than doubled, which might make a #store on a busy street a cost-effective billboard (the entire façade of Kenneth Cole at Bowery and Bond becomes a video ad after-hours).
At the same time, the price of shipping is climbing, squeezing already-tight profit margins and perhaps explaining why Amazon announced last month that the cost of Prime membership will swell by 20 percent.Best of all for New York, most digital purveyors aren’t interested in being in some cavernous mall in the burbs: If they’re gonna get physical, it better be in a #cool #neighborhood. Like, say, Bleecker Street.Still, none of us is going to stop shopping online, and now there’s even talk of new Amazon technology that — if it works as it’s supposed to — would allow customers to scan their bodies at home, then order clothes that’ll fit perfectly, as if you had your own personal bespoke-bot. Can our shops and legacy department stores survive that? I visited Kenneth Himmel, president and CEO of the development company Related Urban, the firm behind that giant mall being built in Hudson Yards.
His office is at the Time Warner Center in Columbus Circle, the mall-office-hotel-condo complex that opened in 2003.“What’s happened is the trends are so accelerated that nobody can keep up,” Himmel says, looking out over Central Park, a scale model of the building we’re in enclosed in a vitrine behind him. “I mean, when you talk about planning and designing these projects, it’s a five-to-seven-year cycle. In the meantime, look what’s happened in the last three years.” In that short space of time, the retail world has “turned upside down,” he says, prompting “everybody to overreact.” He continues: “Now department stores are reporting better sales against last year. Well, last year’s sales were so horrendous, they better be beating it, but the fact is things are stabilizing.” Still, he’s convinced that a Darwinian contraction is inevitable. “We’re the most overretailed country in the world,” he says.I mention to Himmel that on the way in to see him I stopped to browse at the Amazon Books in the mall downstairs (tellingly, somehow, the space used to be a Borders). “They’ve been open for about nine months,” he says. “It’s interesting. If you get inside the story of many of these online retailers, they lose money because people send stuff back. I was out to dinner in Palm Beach two weeks ago, and this woman was raving about the experience she was having at Neiman’s and Saks. She was ordering eight luxury items and returning, like, all but one thing.”
“We’re nervous,” admits Jamie Nordstrom, president of stores for his century-old family retail empire, which spent 30 years looking for a location in the city before landing on the 57th Street space. He knows, of course, that “the days of just opening a store on Madison Avenue” and waiting for people to “flock” in are over.Nordstrom is counting on its new take on the department store to attract the right mix of locals and tourists. (“You’ll never feel claustrophobic in our store,” he swears.) He also touts Nordstrom’s friendly and tech-savvy service (which will include perks like opening the store for middle-of-the-night pickups if you really, really need that Prada backpack). “Service means a million little things,” Nordstrom says. “I want to shop on my phone, but I want to try on in the store. It’ll be in the dressing room waiting for me, in and out in five minutes.” And then how about having your purchase delivered to your home or hotel? “You don’t have to leave with a shopping bag,” he says.A Nordstrom men’s shop, a much smaller companion to the palatial women’s store going up across the street, opened last month. Walking through, I’m struck by the slate-counter coffee bar with the cute barista, the $5-shoeshine guy, and the clerks, who are almost alarmingly friendly.It’s a high-low experience: In a Topshop boutique, $200 mauve sport coats are on offer, but not far away you can run your hands over the glittering blue-sequined fabric of a $2,870 jacket by Comme des Garçons. “Fashion today is not about the price,” says Nordstrom. “That’s where some people get confused. Right now the hottest shoe is the Air Max from Nike, which is $150.”
And, to finish his sentence for him, if Nordstrom is lucky, you’ll go in seeking the pair that can be had for a relative pittance and end up splurging for the $650 Dior sneakers sitting right by them. “I come in the store to find something I didn’t know I was looking for,” Nordstrom philosophizes. “That’s what a great store does. The treasure hunt. A new fit, a new brand.” Such grand adventures aren’t possible online, he says, because digital excels at leading you to things you already know you want. Or, in my case, trying to get me to buy the thing I just bought by hectoring me with ads for the same pair of sneakers I’m already wearing.“Anybody who thinks that the department-store industry is over: You’re crazy,” agrees Himmel, who, admittedly, has some skin in that game. “This Neiman Marcus store in Hudson Yards, that will be doing, I believe, $150 million in volume. That’s my belief.” Still, he humbly submits: “If I had it to do over again, I would actually probably shrink the department store and add a 60,000-square-foot luxury-movie-theater complex.”Propagandizing aside, it’s true that those algorithmic online ads can’t replace the flâneur pleasures of walking the streets, browsing, trying on new versions of ourselves. Jennifer Mankins, who opened her first Bird, a women’s-clothing boutique, in Park Slope in 1999, is finding a different kind of niche in the digital environment. In the past year, she’s opened two new stores, one in Culver City in Los Angeles and one in Fort Greene. “On the one hand, it’s sort of a nutso time” to expand, she says, “because in a lot of ways things are in flux. But it’s really a fascinating time, too.”
Bird is managing to thrive, she posits, because it gives consumers an escape from the internet’s tyranny of choice. “I don’t want to look at 20,000 new black dresses. I want to see ten,” she says. “There’s a value placed on the edit. It can actually be less convenient to shop online. There’s too much.”Himmel manages to be both elegiac and forward-looking about the fate of brick-and-mortar. “I’ve got three granddaughters. One’s 16, one’s 13, one’s 8. I watch them; I watch their friends, I watch my wife; I watch how everybody’s shopping.” And, he concedes, a lot of it is, indeed, online. It’s more convenient, or, once you’re used to it, it definitely feels that way. “But you can’t spend your whole life doing everything on these devices. You hope! That’s our objective: to get you off the device.”—Carl Swanson
So How Are Stores That Are Doing Well … Doing Well?
Not having insanely high rent helps. But it’s more than that: Here, the newfangled, actually successful retail models of the moment. Plus, take interactive tours of five successful stores: Homecoming, CW Pencil Enterprise, McNally Jackson Williamsburg, Flying Solo, and Roman and Williams Guild.
By Lauren Levy, Margaret Rhodes, Katy Schneider, and Hayley Phelan
Flying Solo, 434 West Broadway
Here’s how Flying Solo, a fashion cooperative founded by jewelry designer Elizabeth Solomeina, works: Each of the 70 designers puts in two four-hour shifts a week at the 7,000-square-foot store, and membership fees, which cover rent, production, and events, are taken out of their individual sales. They each get a place to work (at a 5,000-square-foot space down the street) and a store that also acts as a showroom and photo studio. —K.S.
Virtual Store Tour: Click or tap on the above image and swipe or use your keyboard arrows to tour the store. For the best experience on desktop, enter full-screen mode.
What the Designers Say
“I’d noticed while working in the store that customers were drawn to other designers’ tactile materials, so I’ve started using more three-dimensional silhouettes and fabrics.” —Jenny Lai, NOT
“I’m working with people who would typically have been my competitors — they’re sharing with me secrets of their businesses — to try to help me.” —Anna Sokol, WeAnnaBe
“I couldn’t have my own space in Soho — the overhead for that location is extremely expensive. So it’s like Flying Solo prepares the table and we get to enjoy the dinner.” —Daniela Zahradnikova, DZ Zone NYC
“It’s great, free PR for us — between all the designers, they have so many friends and stylists who do editorial pulls. Because of them, we’ve gotten into Vogue Italia, Vogue Arabia.” —Sienna Li, Sienna Li LLC