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MUSEUM QUALITY

Nambé offers home decor that doubles as fine art

By Vicki Phillips

Walk into Nambé’s store in The Forum Shops at Caesars, Las Vegas, and you might think for a moment you were in a museum. In fact, Nambé’s home decor items do appear inside 26 museums around the world.

But the stores are not purposely designed like museums. Rather, the design is a reflection of the sleek, clean lines of the tableware and cookware, which resembles works of modern art. This Santa Fe, N.M.-based retailer sticks to a strict code of form following function, not only with the merchandise, but down to every aspect of the store environment.

“The space and the product must have a unique relationship,” said Bob Borden, Nambé’s vice president of design and creative director. “But the product is the star of the space.”

That product includes elegantly sculpted casseroles, serving platters, salt-and-pepper shakers and candlesticks, most of it created in Nambé’s signature shiny metal alloy. Prices range from a $20 bread-and-butter plate to an $800 crystal bowl.

Although the dictum “form follows function” can be traced to the late 19th century writings of Chicago architect Louis Sullivan, the philosophy really took flight in the modernist design aesthetic of the mid-20th century. One ardent student of this philosophy was Santa Fe sculptor Richard K. Thomas, who was asked by a woman named Pauline Cable to design some cookware. Cable, a bookkeeper at a bronze foundry in Nambé, N.M., became aware of a new alloy through her husband’s work at the nearby Los Alamos laboratory.

The alloy, originally developed for the Manhattan Project but made available for public use after World War II, was ideal for cooking applications. Its nine metals, when combined, take on the quality of thermal retention, maintaining hot or cold temperatures. Moreover, the alloy contains no silver, so it does not tarnish, and no lead or pewter, so it is government-approved for cooking.

From this alloy Richard Thomas sand-casted casserole dishes and bowls, the creations were dubbed Nambéware, and in 1951 Cable began selling them off pegboard and hooks from a roadside shop between Santa Fe and Taos. The products became a huge hit, with their signature undulating curves grounded in the functionality of the items.

In the 1960s Nambé became more visible when major department stores began carrying the distinctive items. The increased visibility led New York City’s Museum of Modern Art to place four Nambé items in an exhibit called “Made in America,” and other museums followed suit.

In 1997 the company’s collection expanded to include not only the Nambé-exclusive alloy metalware, but also full-lead crystal. “With the success of crystal, we realized that the brand could support other materials,” Borden said.

Stainless-steel flatware and porcelain giftware and dinnerware were added next. Soon to come are colored glass and textiles. The product line includes baking dishes, barware, candleholders, frames, vases, stemware, bowls, jewelry, lighting and furniture. Nambé now employs a slate of internationally recognized designers whose creations are winning numerous design awards. The merchandise is sold in 1,300 stores, including Bloomingdale’s, where Nambé is the No. 1 brand for bridal registry items, Gump’s, Neiman Marcus and Saks Fifth Avenue.

The first dedicated Nambé stores were outlets, since the manufacturing process of sand-casting the metalware created seconds. These slightly defective items could be sold at a discount, so the company opened four stores in New Mexico. But over the years, Nambé worked to improve manufacturing efficiency, with fewer seconds produced. As a result, the retail model changed two years ago, with the replacement of outlets with full-retail stores.

“We realized that opening brick-and-mortar stores would help the Nambé brand in two ways,” Borden said. “Because of the labor involved in creating the products [requiring 12 to 15 steps of hand polishing alone] we wanted to create our own retail channel to increase profitability. And stores would give the brand a national presence.”

Merchandise is sold at the original four New Mexico stores — two in Santa Fe, one each in Taos and Mesilla — and in two mall stores: NorthPark Center, Dallas; and Forum Shops. The only outlet store today is in Colorado Mills, in Denver (named Store of the Year in 2003 by the National Association of Store Fixture Manufacturers).

Business at the Dallas store, which opened in the fall of 2003, improves monthly, Borden says, though he declined to offer specific sales data. He did say the privately held company owes the trend in part to the fact that the stores are typically in good company.

“We like to be positioned with other great brands in the marketplace globally,” he said. In NorthPark Center, two of Nambé’s neighbors are Lacoste and Tumi.

At Forum Shops, where Nambé opened last October following the famous mall’s third expansion, it is too early to predict specific trends, Borden says. But here, too, favorable positioning amid chic neighbors may foretell promising returns. Nambé sits next to such established high-end brands as Harry Winston jewelers, Kiehl’s apothecary and Thomas Pink shirtmakers. The store is at street level near the new entrance and pedestrian plaza.

“Because Nambé is directly off Las Vegas Boulevard, it reaps the benefits of daily traffic,” said Maureen Crampton, director of marketing at Forum Shops. Last year the center received 20 million visitors, she says.

Crampton cites two reasons that Nambé fits with the Forum Shops retail mix. First is the center’s sizable international customer base. Some 80 percent of customers are tourists; of those, 40 percent are visiting from abroad. “International visitors are looking for a signature piece designed and made in the Southwest,” she said. “There’s a novelty to that.”

Second, Las Vegas tourists have a mindset of entering a fantasyland — a fact supported by research and capitalized on by tourism advertising. “They’re more extreme, they dine and shop more extravagantly, they splurge more,” Crampton said.

“They make an exception when it comes to purchases, so they might buy an expensive handbag or piece of art they wouldn’t ordinarily buy. That’s where Nambé comes into play, because they have that exclusive feel.”

The target customer is anyone young or old who is design-conscious and appreciates a simple, elegant look. “We’re lucky to have a wide demographic in age,” Borden said. The product is popular because it is equally useful for formal and informal dining, he says.

Crampton says she simply enjoys watching shoppers lay eyes on the exquisitely shaped bowls and vases for the first time. “Customers come in to Nambé, and they’re taken by this merchandise that’s like art pieces in a gallery,” she said. “It’s fun to see people’s reactions to these unique products.”

Shape remains one of the key trends to watch in home decor products, according to Peter Greene, president of NPD Houseworld, a division of The NPD Group, a marketing information company that tracks housewares categories. “Manufacturers continue to explore new shapes for their products,” he said, pointing to oval dinnerware with a contemporary, East-meets-West design, and curved cookware with a modern feel and ergonomic appeal.

Nambé continues to live by those early philosophical design tenets. “Thomas put the standard on our products and what we stand for,” Borden said. “We have kept that in the forefront while developing other product lines. The store design, too, must encompass those same qualities: clean, sensual, organic.”

Housewares sales are declining, except for slight increases in everyday dinnerware and beverage ware and flat sales of bake ware, says Greene. He attributes this trend to cost-of-living rises that have consumers cautious about their discretionary spending.

But upgrading housewares is an attractive alternative for people seeking change in the face of a softening housing market, which bodes well for retailers of home decor, Greene says.

“[People] may not be able to invest in a new home, but they’re able to change the decor,” he said. It is also to Nambé’s advantage that “a niche market attracts high-end consumers, who are likely to fare better than the average consumer insofar as disposable income.”

Borden acknowledges that as the marketplace evolves, Nambé’s stores must too. “We’re looking at new concepts,” he said. The aim in store design is a look that is clean and modern, yet warm and inviting, he says.

Far from a rush into grand expansion plans, though, the Nambé strategy is to proceed with great patience, making sure the brand is cultivated, understood and absorbed in the marketplace. “We must grow at a disciplined rate so we don’t damage the brand,” Borden said. “We will look for opportunities in Chicago, New York, San Francisco and other large markets, but there’s nothing on the drawing board.”

What is on the drawing board is continuing to blend functionality and design in the merchandise. The retailer remains dedicated to making Nambé a useful product for everyday lifestyles.

“It’s amazing how we’ve come to where we are now — from a manufacturer of metal goods to being a true lifestyle brand,” said Borden. “That will be our focus in the years ahead.”

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