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J. MCLAUGHLIN, THE CHAIN THAT WANTS YOU TO THINK IT ISN’T

By Dees Stribling

A consumer can go into any chain store and know pretty much what to expect — right down to the layout and merchandise. The goal, so the thinking goes, is to comfort shoppers with the familiar, not to surprise them with the novel.

Upscale clothier J. McLaughlin took that philosophy and reversed it. “We took a hard look at the various clothing chains and noticed that they had too much in common,” said President and CEO Steven Siegler. “If you covered the signage, you wouldn’t know whose shop was whose. That wasn’t for us. We wanted to be the un-Gap.”

As a result, no two of J. McLaughlin’s 36 stores, most of which are located on the eastern seaboard, look alike, nor do they carry quite the same stock. For a retailer that locates in malls or even lifestyle centers, such emphasis on novelty would be difficult, and often impossible. But J. McLaughlin eschews conventional shopping centers and is unlikely to seek such locations for expansion, says Siegler. Instead, the company prefers sites on urban shopping streets in high-net-worth neighborhoods, shopping districts or downtown areas in affluent suburbs, and pricey resort areas.

Examples of shopping-street J. McLaughlin stores include two in New York City, one of which is on posh Madison Avenue. In branching out into suburbs such as wealthy Westport, Conn., 50 miles northeast of Manhattan, the retailer selected a Main Street location among buildings that had been standing for over a century. The average household income within a mile of this shop is $183,000 a year. In Winnetka, Ill., a North Shore community 20 miles north of downtown Chicago, where yearly household income averages $199,800, the J. McLaughlin store sits on Lincoln Avenue, the prime shopping street.

Thus, the retailer has established a presence in urban and suburban areas the wealthy are likely to frequent, but it is also pursuing the carriage trade in such resort towns as Long Island’s Bridgehampton, East Hampton and Southampton, as well as Nantucket, Mass., and Palm Beach, Fla.

The stores are comparatively small, measuring from 700 to 3,000 square feet, with the average measuring about 1,500 square feet, Siegler says. “We’re not absolutely wedded to a certain size,” he said. “If we can make it work, we’re open to various sizes and configurations. For instance, we’re going to open a small store on Lexington Avenue in Manhattan, and it will be a jewel box. But in Charlotte, North Carolina, we’re in a renovated old house that we adapted into a comfortable retail space with room to move around. We’re in a big old house in Nantucket, too.”

Finding such locations can take a good deal of patience, Siegler says. “We work really hard at it, finding places we can make into something unique but which also have nearby parking, easy pedestrian access, physical and mechanical integrity, and the other features we look for,” he said. “We look for Main Street locations whenever possible and sometimes have waited quite a while for the right location to become available.”

Going forward, the company could open about a half dozen stores a year, but there is no rush, Siegler says. As exacting as J. McLaughlin’s site-selection standards are, there is still plenty of room to expand nationwide, he says. “As we grow, people learn about us through word of mouth, and we’ve also found that the same customer that’s in the Hamptons in the summer might be in Naples [Fla.] or Palm Beach in the winter and shop at our locations in both,” Siegler said. “We like to be where people have time to shop — either on vacation or on weekends at home.”

That sort of methodical approach to growth has been characteristic of the privately held company since brothers Kevin and Jay McLaughlin opened their first store in Manhattan nearly 30 years ago. That store was a showcase for Kevin McLaughlin’s designs, which were in step with the Annie Hall-inspired trends of the time. The store was a success, and the J. McLaughlin lines have evolved into what the company calls “preppy with a twist.”

The J. McLaughlin look, comprising men’s and women’s fashions, consists largely of its interpretations of such preppy favorites as corduroys, tailored jackets, cashmere sweaters, silk dresses and ties, and leather handbags, made at the company’s factories in Brooklyn, N.Y. and in China. Products include a Princeton button-down for men in navy, mustard or orange that goes for $110 and a quilted sweater for women in red, coffee or navy/green tartan, for $185. The “twist” often involves colors not always associated with preppy clothes, however — bright, though not outrageous. “We don’t pay that much attention to trends in fashion,” said Siegler. “If the fashion gurus say black, it doesn’t matter — we’ll still have color.”

The stores themselves sport bright colors. “It’s one of the design elements that makes each shop distinctive,” said Doug Larson, a partner at New York City-based architecture firm Larson and Paul, who has designed almost all the company’s stores. Larson points to the Palm Beach store, which opened in the late 1990s on famed shopping street Worth Avenue, as being important in the evolution of J. McLaughlin shops, partly because of its color scheme — initially a tough sell to the city of Palm Beach’s Architecture and Aesthetic Review Commission. “Worth Avenue is an exuberant place, and we wanted an exuberant shop,” said Larson. “We wanted a bright green interior with painted columns on the walls, and a yellow awning on the outside. The commission initially considered such colors as navy blue and hunter green as appropriate for an upscale clothing store, just like any other upscale clothing store.”

Eventually, Larson and his team were able to persuade the commission (with the help of its lone architect member) that the proposed colors in fact meshed well with the art deco building in which the store was located and with other Mediterranean- and Spanish-influenced designs on Worth Avenue.

Neither these colors nor any other design elements are at odds with their surroundings, says Larson. “We wanted a unique, comfortable shopping experience for J. McLaughlin’s customers, so the designs aren’t going to be jarring or different just to be different,” he said. Since the early days, the company has sought interesting buildings in nice neighborhoods and then designed its stores to draw from the surroundings, he says. “In Palm Beach we understood the Mediterranean influence,” Larson said, “just as in Wellesley we drew from the Georgian and colonial styles that predominate there.” Very often local influence expresses itself even in seemingly small details, such as the roses painted on the walls of the Nantucket shop, a nod to a kind of plant the island is known for, growing especially near picturesque old cottages. “If our customers wanted the same thing,” said Siegler, “they’d go to a mall.”