You will absolutely amour the new Printemps store that opened on Friday in Manhattan. But will you shop there?
In what has to be the most exciting retail introduction not just in New York but perhaps in the entire country in a very long time, the debut of the French department store on the first day of spring — if you forgot your high school French, its name literally translates to spring — is both extraordinary and a giant gamble. Not only is the company asking consumers to shop at a new luxury store with a name that some of them don’t know and may not even be able to pronounce correctly but they are doing it at one of the more unlikely retail destinations in the city: at the corner of Wall Street and Broadway deep in the heart of the downtown financial district. More on that in a minute, but first let’s celebrate the store.
At about 55,000 square feet (a little over 5,000 square meters in the original French) the new Printemps is spread out over two floors of the historic former home of the Bank of New York, a 1930 art deco landmark. To be fair some of the store is in an adjacent building that lacks that pedigree but within the Bank building is the magnificent Red Room, once the lobby of the former Irving Trust tenant with floor to ceiling mosaic tile work, majestic arches, high ceilings and the kind of gravitas that no other store in New York even approaches.
Much of the rest of the store is more traditional retail selling space albeit with a spacious, spread-out layout with seating areas, elegant product displays, lots of open space and, lest we forget, five restaurants and bars, all of which will be glad to pour you a glass of champagne for your shopping excursion.
While there is a small men’s section — very small — and some home décor like candles, books and Lalique vases sprinkled about, most of the store is devoted to women’s fashion and beauty. In fact, an awkward space connecting two sections of the second floor is cleverly labeled “the beauty corridor,” a cave-like space with curved walls and fixtures. Apparel is leisurely merchandised and if you’re interested in shoes, there’s a posh living room area where you can try them on.
While most of us would call Printemps a department store, the company itself went to great lengths not to use that label, knowing it no longer has quite the reputation it once did with American shoppers. Comparisons to the late-lamented Barney’s are being made by shoppers and store executives and why not: it has much the same vibe and many brands — 25 percent Printemps says — that are French labels never sold in the U.S. In the beauty section, it’s 50 percent it says.
During the soft opening in the week before it’s official debut, the store was busy — but by no means slammed — with a mix of those who knew what they were looking at but more likely curious onlookers, locals and tourists alike. A salesperson checking out a shopper’s purchase said a box of decorative matches with a drawing of the 1 Wall Street building was the best seller so far. At $20, it probably wasn’t the price strata Printemps had in mind when they spent untold tens of millions of euros building the store.
And therein lies the big question: now that they’ve built it, will they come? The FiDi district is not exactly shopping central and while, yes, there’s plenty of money in the neighborhood in the business of Wall Street, are they going out and buying the $3,000 outfits that need to be the mainstay of the store to be successful? The tourists visiting the Ground Zero World Trade Center area and taking selfies with the charging bull down the street will most certainly come in and gawk but they are likely to be $20-matchbox buyers, perhaps with a champagne chaser.
You’ve got to love Printemps for trying this. The last big overseas retailer to come into Manhattan was Takashima, from Japan, which set up shop on Fifth Avenue in the 50s with a gorgeous multi-story new build in 1993. It meandered along for years but the 2008-2009 Great Recession eventually took it down and it closed in 2010. And let’s not forget that comparisons to Barney’s may not be in Printemps best interests given its painful demise.
Printemps, which has 21 stores in France and Doha (they do call them department stores, by the way, on their website company profile) as well as a few smaller spin-off brands, is owned by a Qatari investment group so they would seem to have the resources to be in the New York City retail marketplace for the long-run.
One has to hope so because the retailing business desperately needs more stores like Printemps to get shoppers off their screens and back into physical locations. If you’re in that lower Manhattan neighborhood — even if you have to make a special trip or detour — that’s what you should do. It will uplift your retail spirits and even restore your faith in the creativity and boldness of the retailing business.
And who doesn’t need a nice box of twenty-buck decorative matches?
WarrensReport 