Nordstrom has just provided us with renderings of the ground-floor interior of its 230,000 square foot flagship in Vancouver. It appears that the Pacific Centre store will carry substantially more luxury brands than Nordstrom’s Calgary and Ottawa stores, with dedicated spaces for brands carried at nearby competitor, Holt Renfrew.
The rendering of Nordstrom’s ground-floor women’s designer handbags department, above, shows shop-in-stores for brands including Céline, Saint Laurent Paris, Valentino and Balenciaga. Retail Insider’s William Connor took the photo, below, showing an in-store Delvaux installation, as well as a display for Chloé bags. For those unfamiliar, Delvaux is a pricey Belgian luxury leathergoods brand with bags costing into the thousands, available in the United States at Barneys New York.
The rendering of Nordstrom’s ground-floor women’s shoe department, below, shows boutiques for Christian Louboutin and Balenciaga. The Balenciaga shoe shop will be a first for Canada, and Louboutin’s boutique will be a Canadian second, following the opening of the Louboutin boutique at Toronto’s Yorkdale Shopping Centre Holt Renfrew in December of 2013.
Holt Renfrew, located a block north of Nordstrom, carries all of the brands mentioned above except for Delvaux. By the end of 2016, Holt Renfrew’s 150,000 square foot store will expand by 40,000 square feet to occupy about 190,000 square feet. Its women’s handbags department will expand to a whopping 30,000 square feet, while women’s footwear will triple in size to about 10,000 square feet. Although Holt Renfrew won’t officially reveal what new brands may come to its expanded store, sources say that Prada-owned Miu Miu could open a shop-in-store leathergoods concession, and that its women’s footwear department could see several new shop-in-store branded boutiques, similar to Holt’s Yorkdale Shopping Centre location in Toronto. Yorkdale’s Holt’s features footwear shops for Jimmy Choo, Manolo Blahnik, Christian Louboutin, Gucci and Salvatore Ferragamo.
Although Nordstrom’s Calgary and Ottawa stores carry some luxury brands, few of the labels listed above are carried at either (with the exception of Valentino and Chloé). Furthermore, neither of those locations feature handbag and footwear shops-in-stores like those portrayed in the renderings above. On Thursday, Retail Insider’s Helen Siwak will tour the new Vancouver Nordstrom store, and she will report back to us with her findings.
This is great… With so many labels out there, why compete and carry the exact same things? Common sense retail is coming back. Now, future of retail looks stronger and better than ever