There have been some dramatic changes in Manhattan’s retail landscape over the past 12 months and the visual merchandising bar has been raised yet again. John Ryan reports.

A year’s a long time anywhere in retail and to judge by the changes that have taken place in New York’s Manhattan Island, it’s almost half a lifetime. Whether it’s the arrival of a major Canadian retail brand, the first foray by department store operator Nordstrom into the city or niche retailing from Gap, much has altered.

To an extent, this is of course a given for a city where the pace really is faster than elsewhere. But even by local standards, it does seem things are running away into the distance, although the other point about the Big Apple is that shoppers are more than capable of keeping up with the shifting landscape.

Finding new material for the Retail Week/SAS retail tour of the city, which coincided with the start of NRF last week, was therefore a lot less difficult than normal and for those who came along, there was much to digest. The US may have been in trouble economically – where hasn’t? – but new stores keep appearing in New York and if you want to see optimism and hope springing eternal, there are few better places to do so.

And strangely, those retailers that were arrivistes last year now seem an embedded part of the retail panorama. Walking into the massive slow food emporium Eataly, the buzz was the same as at the beginning of 2011. If you can make it here…

Joe Fresh, 5th Avenue and 16th

Joe Fresh

Joe Fresh

Perched on the corner of a block in mid(ish)-town Manhattan, the arrival of Joe Fresh in the city is something of a landmark. Joe Fresh is a Canadian retail phenomenon, going from a standing start in 2006 to become the country’s fourth-largest clothing brand. It started life as an integrated clothing offer within Loblaws, the Weston-owned Canadian grocery chain. Now it has taken its first steps in the US and there is a store on Madison Avenue, a pop-up shop that has come, been and gone, and this branch.

Marketing director Lindsay Cook says that opening large stores in “a market where the brand is a complete unknown was a challenge”. But judging by the number of shoppers queuing to snap up the value-led merchandise, housed in an orange and white environment that immediately makes you think upscale, this looks like a runaway success.

There is much to be said for keeping things simple and Joe Fresh achieves this. Another, larger store, further uptown on Fifth is set to open in late March.      

Treasure & Bond, 350 West Broadway

Treasure and Bond

Treasure and Bond

West Broadway, way downtown, is one of Manhattan’s grungier looking fashion streets, but it is also among its most fashionable, distinct from the tourist hordes of nearby SoHo Broadway. And it is here that Nordstrom, the department store operator based in Seattle, has decided to dip its toes into the city’s commercial waters.

It has done so, however, not by creating a New York version of its normal glossy department stores, but by opening a concept store that has almost nothing to do with its parent.

Welcome to Treasure & Bond, a two-storey modernist building with a long glass frontage and the kind of stock and visual merchandising that is likely to see Anthropologie, Colette or Merci fans heading for its doors. Everything about this store seems antithetical to the Nordstrom norm – this is not about sheen and polish, but is concerned with plywood, concrete floors and perimeter display structures that resemble plastic honeycombs.

All of which would be pretty impressive in its own right, but the real feature of this store is that it is not about making money. In a city where the golden rule is that if it doesn’t earn, it’s not worth having, this sounds strange. It does of course make money, but all profits go to local New York charities. This is a philanthropic exercise.

It’s hard not wonder, however, whether the two-year lease that Nordstrom has taken (the shop opened in August) has more to do with softening up relevant bodies prior to opening a department store proper, having become familiar with trading in the city. Whatever the reasons, this is one of the more interesting retail phenomena in the city and on the day of visiting it seemed to be finding favour with the locals.

1969 Premium Jeans, SoHo

1969 Premium Jeans

1969 Premium Jeans

Last year, 2011, was a difficult year for Gap Inc across most of its fascias and it seemed that the Gap offer in particular was discounted for rather more of the 12 months than not. But the retail group still possesses a knack for surprising and this small store on Broadway shows that it has been thinking abut how it might diversify its offer. 1969 Premium Jeans is, of course, a reference to the year in which Gap started business in San Francisco and this is about rekindling some of that pioneer spirit with what a member of staff referred to as a “jeans lab”. The word ‘premium’ is also telling as this is the better end of the mid-market.

Externally, the store is relatively low-key with the clue to the shop’s provenance being provided by the choice of font for the logo. Within lies a narrow store where there are certainly jeans, but accessories also feature in a space at the back, displayed on plain wood tables with daylight provided by a conservatory-style roof. There is nothing spectacular here, but it is an effective way of taking a piece of what Gap is about and making more of it.

Saks, Fifth Avenue

Saks Fifth Avenue

Saks Fifth Avenue

It would be easy to stop reading here with the thought: ‘Isn’t this a New York department store that may be an institution but is the same as it has always been?’ In terms of the number of floors, there are 10 of them, and perhaps in terms of the generally wealthy clientele, little has changed. The real action, however, is on the ‘second floor’ (that’s the first floor to you and me), which has been transformed from the usual New York department store grande dame collection of glitzy areas into the upturned hull of an ocean-going yacht.

This is a collection of women’s uber brands, each with its own space, but all housed within an overarching room that looks like an upturned boat that has been lovingly fashioned from planks, instead of pre-formed fibreglass.

The whole project has taken about 18 months to complete and is the latest part of an ongoing store-wide redevelopment that has also seen substantial changes to the beauty floor on the ground level. Mention should also be made of the eighth floor shoe department, which has its own zipcode and was certainly a forerunner to Selfridges’ shoe galleries but which, if big is better, it now certainly trails.   

Apple, Grand Central

Apple

Apple

This version of the Apple format is by no means the easiest to navigate, but on the other hand at one fell swoop it probably takes the title of store with the best view in the ‘Bigger’ Apple. With its commanding view over the concourse of Grand Central Station, the temptation is to enter the shop just to take a look around and to spend a little time admiring how architects in the early part of the last century were able to come up with something that is both functional and a thing of beauty. Concomitant would be to marvel how 21st century architects have managed to create a store that melds with all of this.  

That said, the majority of those in Apple Grand Central were there to shop. And given that the station is a commuter hub for the city, the new pay and collect within 12 minutes service means that those making the journey from, say, New Haven, can collect as they arrive at their destination.

The number of staff in the store was astonishing – almost as many as there were shoppers – just when you thought that Apple looks as if it is approaching irreproachability, it has taken another step forward.