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CANDYMAN SEEKS SWEET DEALS FOR CONFECTIONARY STORES

By Molly Knight

If candy man Jeff Rubin has his way, dentists will soon be busy filling cavities, at least up along the East Coast. Rubin, a founder of several candy store concepts — call him Willy Wonka, if you will — has launched his newest sweets concept, IT’Sugar, and says he will open about three new stores in each of the coming three years.

Sweet-toothed concepts already under Rubin’s belt include Dylan’s Candy Bar (which he founded with Ralph Lauren’s daughter, Dylan), FAO Schweetz, an ice cream bar inside FAO Schwarz; and Candy Land, a confectionary department within the Toys ‘R’ Us store in Times Square, New York City.

Rubin opened the first IT’Sugar unit in July at the Pier at Caesars, in Atlantic City, N.J., the four-level retail center opposite Caesars Atlantic City Hotel and Casino developed by Greenwich, Conn.-based Gordon Group Holdings and partly owned by Taubman Centers.

The two-level, 6,000-square-foot unit is the department store of sweets. Some 5,000 different types of candy — including 48 different colors of M&Ms and 12 flavors of gummy bears — line the shelves. Sour candy is sold under a tree bearing large, sugary fake fruit. In the center of the store stands a giant replica of Margate, N.J.’s famed Lucy the Elephant — the 90-ton wooden and tin sculpture made in 1881 that is now a national historic landmark — only the replica is made of over 1 million jelly beans.

“Sixty-year-old women are dancing in the store, and 5-year-olds buy lots of candy,” said Craig Gordon, the Boca Raton, Fla.-based candy company’s director of real estate. “Our customer is everyone.”

“Everywhere you look, you see IT’Sugar bags and T-shirts and candy,” said Jamie Hersh, an account executive at Breslow Partners, the Philadelphia-based PR firm associated with the Pier at Caesars. “The store has had more than 125,000 visitors a week, so it’s obviously been a tremendous success. There is a real buzz surrounding it, and we couldn’t be happier.” The Boardwalk store capitalizes on the excitement surrounding the slot machines, roulette wheels and high-stakes poker tables that define the area. The store is open from 11 a.m. to midnight, seven days a week. Insiders say the timeliness and placement of this first IT’Sugar unit is particularly smart, given that Atlantic City casinos earned a record $5 billion last year. Additionally, the patrons who frequent the pier tend to have high levels of disposable income.

IT’Sugar is going to find itself in some pretty distinguished company soon at the Pier (which is patterned after the Forum Shops at Caesars, in Las Vegas). The Boardwalk will eventually boast Burberry, Gucci, Louis Vuitton and Tiffany.

Certain items in this particular candy store attest to at least some orientation toward adults: edible bikinis and alcoholic drink mixes, not to mention throwbacks to the famed Atlantic City saltwater taffy from the 1950s. “Most candy is bought by adults for adults,” Gordon said. “Our target market is females aged 15 to 45.” This, he says, is the group that eats the most candy.

Gordon says IT’Sugar makes candy-buying an interactive experience. “I Want Candy” and “Candy Girl” blare from the loudspeakers, and a group of moving sculptures called the Candy Rappers performs rap songs for kids.

The most trafficked area of the store is the make-your-own-candy-bar section — IT’Sugar’s version of the Build-A-Bear thing — where for $5.99 patrons can select all the ingredients for their ideal candy bar and then watch as it is made. The selections are placed in chocolate (milk, light or dark) and sent through a cooling unit that takes 15 minutes to congeal. Hersh calls it the first build-a-bar station in the world. “You choose the chocolate and mixings, and we’ll make the bar,” said Gordon. “It’s a real hit.”

A quarter pound of candy costs $2.45, while a full pound goes for $9.80. In the case of the Harry Potter jelly beans, the supposed flavors — earwax, boogers and vomit — might be seen to be as questionable as the taste. These retail at $12.99 per pound.

In addition to the largest selection of M&Ms to be found anywhere in the world (outside of Hershey’s corporate stores in Las Vegas, New York City and Orlando, Fla.), and the largest array of Jelly Belly’s in any store in the world, IT’Sugar also features an all-Hershey’s section for chocolate lovers and a Pez corner filled with dozens of the famed dispensers branded with the likes of Star Wars and NASCAR.

So far the Atlantic City store is the only one of its kind. Gordon says Rubin chose the location because he regrets not having opened a candy shop on the Vegas Strip at the Forum Shops at Caesars when he was asked to in the early ’90s. “He didn’t want to make the same mistake twice,” Gordon said.

But the company has two prototypes, Gordon says. One will be patterned after the 6,000-square-foot Atlantic City flagship and geared toward tourist-oriented places. The other will be a 1,200-square-foot unit designed to be an elegant, bulk candy store in bustling malls. The first of this latter type is to open next month in the Aventura (Fla.) Mall.

“Our preferred co-tenants are stores geared to teen and 20-year-old females, highly trafficked restaurants and kids’ entertainment,” said Gordon. At Aventura, IT’Sugar will join other sweets tenants, such as Ben & Jerry’s, Cinnabon, Godiva Chocolatier, Haagen-Dazs, Kron Chocolatier and Mrs. Field’s Original Cookies.

But could such a proliferation of sweet choices create a sugar headache at the mall, leading customers to overlook the young brand? Not at all, says Gordon. He says IT’Sugar will set itself apart with its emphasis on in-store play, inspired partly by Willy Wonka’s factory in Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory — though unlike the children in the book, all of Gordon’s customers will have a happy experience, he says.

“It is a feel-good environment,” said Gordon. “People come in to have fun and relive their childhoods. The store is bright, colorful and overloads the senses.” IT’Sugar will also focus on bringing back an old-fashioned candy store feel, with elegant fixtures, themed pieces, special types of bags for sweets and hand-blown glass bins (not the cheap, plastic, modern kind) to hold the treats.

Expansion will initially be concentrated in Florida, says Gordon, with the company working its way up the East Coast. He declined to give sales per square foot data, simply calling it “a lot.”

“What I will say is that we average about 8,000 people a day coming through the store,” he said.

Currently, no plans exist for international expansion, though Gordon wouldn’t rule that out.

Though IT’Sugar is in its infancy, Hersh says the company has already perfected a recipe for success. “It’s more than just candy,” said Hersh. “It’s the attractions that set it apart.”