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BROOKS BROTHERS TESTS COUNTRY CLUB CONCEPT

By Rodger Brown

Brooks Brothers is loosening its Windsor knot in hopes of finding new life and spurring growth. For years the company has been puffing along as the likes of Men’s Wearhouse sprinted past.

In 2001 Enfield, Conn.-based Retail Brand Alliance bought — some would say rescued — Brooks Brothers from British department store company Marks & Spencer. Since then, Retail Brand owner Claudio Del Vecchio, scion of the family that controls Italian eye-wear giant Luxxotica, has been steering the chain back toward its classic roots on the one hand and prodding it toward international expansion on the other. Retail Brand sold its Casual Corner Group in 2005 to free up working capital.

Brooks Brothers operates approximately 180 stores in the U.S., nearly 100 across Asia, three in Italy and one each in Chile, France, the U.K. and the United Arab Emirates. In May the chain opened a Brooks Brothers Country Club store at the Grand Boulevard at Sandestin (Fla.) town center. This is the first of seven such stand-alone units, built around the chain’s Country Club line of sportswear, that are to be located only at select resort destinations. “At this point, we’re considering this a test,” Del Vecchio told the press in April, in anticipation of the Sandestin opening. “It’s really going to be all over the place. Some of the locations are very seasonal. Others are less seasonal.”

Kathy Self, Brooks Brothers’ head of real estate, explained the origin of the experimental concept to SCT. “The merchants developed Country Club product in our stores that’s done extremely well,” Self said. “We said, ‘If we took the Country Club product and added to it from our other sportswear lines in our store, could this stand alone in a resort area?’ ”

That will be known soon enough. By the end of next year, the Sandestin unit will be joined by stores at resorts in Houston; Myrtle Beach, S.C.; Newport, R.I.; Sarasota, Fla.; Southampton, N.Y.; and Tucson, Ariz. “Once they’ve been open for a while, we’re going to really look at it and see if what we planned comes to fruition,” Self said. “Like any new concept, you have to tweak it a little bit. The customer will tell us.”

Brooks Brothers could use some good news. Its reputation suffered some wear and tear during the 1990s under the ownership of Marks & Spencer. But Marks & Spencer’s decision to sell the chain for $225 million “finally brought the curtain down on its disastrous Brooks Brothers acquisition,” said British newspaper The Independent.

Self says the County Club stores are very much in line with the Brooks Brothers heritage — during the 1930s and ’40s the company would open temporary summer stores to serve its well-heeled customers on vacation; the first of these opened in Newport, R.I. “They were there for every summer when their customer who lived in New York City went to Rhode Island for the summer to go to their summer home,” Self said. “They said, ‘Boy, we miss Brooks Brothers, we would love for you to be here.’ So Brooks Brothers would open and be down there for a few months. When our customers went to Florida for the winter, Brooks Brothers would open a store that would cover them for the winter months so they wouldn’t miss shopping at Brooks Brothers.”

But these days Brooks Brothers dare not rely on a limited customer base of wealthy shoppers with summer homes and winter getaways. The Country Club stores are intended to expose the Brooks Brothers name to a new set of customers who might never see the Madison Avenue flagship, in New York City. “If we can take our business closer to our existing customer, and at the same time have the opportunity to expose people who’ve never shopped at Brooks Brothers to our sportswear,” Self said, “what a wonderful thing is that! These are people who wouldn’t have made it into one of Brooks Brothers’ bigger stores, but all of a sudden we’ve got a customer for life.”

This move extending the brand through the Country Club stores is one of the few choices the company has to cultivate a new customer, says Marshal Cohen, a retail analyst at NPD Group, a Port Washington, N.Y.-based market research firm. “Growth is hard to come by without finding external opportunities,” Cohen said. “Brooks Brothers is fairly well entrenched in the marketplace, but they’re now saying: ‘We want to grow and make our stores bigger, but we can’t necessarily get our existing customer to buy more. What we have to do is find a way to tap into a new customer base and new platforms.’ A new platform grows out of something they’ve already had success with, and Country Club gives them the opportunity to give them a higher profile as a stand-alone entity. That’s where they’re going to get their growth from. Either that or go out and buy somebody else.”

But does Country Club have to confine itself to resorts? Self says there has been significant interest from shopping centers that would welcome Country Club as a straight-ahead sportswear store.

“I don’t know if we’ll open in other malls,” she said. “That’s a decision we’ll have to make as a company. Right now we could open in 50 more resorts. We’ve been asked to, but right now we’re saying, ‘Let us tweak and make sure we’ve got all our ducks in a row.’ ”