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RETAIL AS ART

Prada’s New York flagship doubles as a performance space

By Maura K. Ammenheuser

Dressing rooms feature cameras, and glass doors that turn opaque at the flick of a switch. Other areas of the SoHo flagship leave shoppers feeling like patrons at a modern art museum.

Prada, the upscale Italian fashion house, is known for shoes and beautiful leather goods. But its newest stores seem to be more about architecture and the shopping experience than about the merchandise.

Prada has joined a contest among luxury retailers to grab consumers’ attention with increasingly outlandish designs. But retail industry experts are divided over the strategy. While some are impressed, others suspect it might end up being an expensive way for the retailers all to look alike.

In New York City’s SoHo district, Prada opened the first of four distinctive flagships in December; the other three will debut over the next two years in Beverly Hills, Calif.; San Francisco; and Tokyo streetfront spots.

The Milan-based retailer hired world-renowned architects to create the stores, prescribing sprawling spaces and unconventional materials dedicated to aesthetic experience and high technology. The retailer wants “to reinvent the concept of shopping, experimenting with new environments that can enhance the brand while focusing on the individual,” according to a statement released by Prada. “The design aims at strengthening the relationship between the brand and its customers by means of ever-improved solutions.”

The store’s family owners declined to comment about the new concept. But designer Miuccia Prada told Women’s Wear Daily in March of last year: “We believe many brands now have stores that look alike, and that’s just boring. We wanted to develop an experimental store. We wanted to ask, ‘What does shopping mean?’”

Apparently, it means exploring innovative spaces, and if customers pick up a pair of shoes while they’re at it, so much the better.

“People are just sort of bored with the retail that they have,” said Peter Levine, a branding expert at DG Worldwide, a New York City-based consulting firm. “Prada has always been wanting to set the curve.” With these stores, “they’re really wanting to reclaim what it means to be in retail today.”

Each flagship will have its own cutting-edge look, including lots of open space and room to relax. New York City’s store was designed by Rem Koolhaas of the Netherlands, who last year won the Pritzker Prize, architecture’s greatest honor. Koolhaas is also creating the California flagships.

The New York City store has 23,000 square feet on two levels. Interior walls sport molded plastic foam and unpainted pink Sheetrock, among other materials. A staircase serves as a display area for shoes, and the store includes an amphitheater. (Prada spokeswoman Katherine Ross said this is the only flagship to double as a performance space.)

The new stores include high-tech touches in the fitting rooms, whose glass doors turn opaque for privacy. Shoppers can rummage for items, colors and sizes via a computer located right in the fitting room and gauge how they’ll look in an outfit in any conceivable light, from any angle, with lighting controls and video cameras. Prada is also installing mechanical racks and fixtures that can be easily shifted for flexible use of floor space.

The Rodeo Drive, Beverly Hills, boutique, to open in the fall, will take up 21,000 square feet on three levels. It will feature a tiger-striped central staircase topping a tunnel, elliptical glass display cases and a mezzanine.

San Francisco will see a 44,000-square-foot, 10-story building — nicknamed “the cheese grater” — cloaked in stainless steel punctured with tiny openings for a dramatic lighting effect. The floor plan is a hodgepodge of spaces, each with its own mood. The opening is scheduled for 2003, although some doubt was cast on the project when The Wall Street Journal quoted Prada owner Patrizio Bertelli as saying that the project was “on the rocks.” The company has since insisted that the store is on track.

The Swiss architectural firm of Herzog & de Meuron, also a Pritzker Prize winner, is creating a 31,000-square-foot, six-level store, to open in the fall in Tokyo. That will include fiberglass display cases with fiber-optic lights, but its most distinct feature will be a transparent facade.

None of the architects could be reached for comment. However, Prada quoted the firm’s principal, Jacques Herzog, as saying the retailer wants “a new type of architecture, one involving an exchange of experience, that participates in a cultural debate … it goes beyond the traditional boundaries of architecture and fashion.”

Prada is not the only designer unveiling big flagships. Gucci Group, Hermès International and Louis Vuitton are among those that have recently opened vast, opulent boutiques in New York City or are planning to do so.

Large stores make sense if a company has a good reason to build them, and strengthening a brand is a legitimate reason, said Arnold Aronson, managing director of retail strategies at Kurt Salmon Associates, a New York City-based retail consulting firm.

Prada’s stores do well, with sales levels above the industry average, Aronson said, though he couldn’t quantify the company’s revenue. Future stores “certainly can be described as innovative and ahead of the competition in terms of creating a customer intrigue or curiosity,” he said.

But there are pitfalls in this expensive, high-profile architectural strategy, others warn. Because other fashion chains have created attention-grabbing stores, there’s a risk that they may all ultimately look the same, cautioned Candace Corlette, principal with consultants WSL Strategic Retail, New York City.

“It does seem as though they are trying to outdo each other,” she said. “I do wonder if Prada will be so unique that consumers will remember that experience.”

As for the entertainment aspect of retail — which Prada incorporates within its New York City performance space — “is it a novelty anymore?” Corlette asked.

Still, for the moment, at least, even Corlette said she is impressed.

“Right now Prada is quite a unique identity,” she said. “It has that cachet of cutting-edge Italian fashion.”

The company’s finances, however, have looked somewhat rocky lately. Saddled with $1 billion in debt, Prada was forced to cancel an initial public offering.

Company officials declined to comment on current revenue, sales projections, merchandising, construction costs, competition or existing stores. Besides the new flagship, it has four freestanding stores in New York City and locations at shopping centers in Americana Manhasset, on Long Island, N.Y.; South Coast Plaza, Costa Mesa, Calif.; and Bal Harbour (Fla.) Shops.

But analysts don’t believe a poor economy necessarily dooms Prada’s ambitions.

“It is a risky moment for luxury goods,” Corlette acknowledged. But “more and more of the luxury brands are trying to control the environment as the department store disappoints.”

Luxury retailers are not preoccupied with the economy in the immediate future, anyway, others note.

“Long-term players don’t necessarily have to look at the ups and downs of the business cycle when they’re making strategic decisions,” Kurt Salmon’s Aronson said.

And while the flagships’ design may be disconcerting, “they want to be a little elusive, a little intimidating,” Levine said.

This would hardly be the first major retail risk anyone took, anyway.

“It was a big revolution when people put music in their stores,” Levine of DG Worldwide pointed out. “It was a big revolution when people put scents in their stores.”

He compared new store openings to jazz club debuts — as events. Starbucks, of course, added entertainment even to coffee retailing.

“The job of people who want to stay in business is,” Levine said, “how do I keep engaging people?”

For better or worse, Prada has just come up with its answer to that question.

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