The main floor of the department store is the window to the soul of the retailer. It presents the vision of the store, giving consumers an overall sense of the retail philosophy — energetic, intimate, hip, classic. And it’s a big money-maker, too, capturing impulse dollars as shoppers wander in from the street or mall. Francine Klein, executive vice president and general merchandise manager of fashion accessories — which includes overseeing cosmetics, accessories, shoes and intimate apparel — recently talked about these hot categories, how they’re doing, what’s driving them and what to look for in spring shoe trends.
Related Articles
WWD: What is your strongest category in beauty?
Francine Klein: Right now, for the first time in a long time, the fragrance business is trending equally as good as the color-treatment business. That is a unique circumstance. But the treatment end of the business is very good, particularly at the higher end of the business, where people are really making an investment.
WWD: So did fragrance hit this level in the past quarter?
F.K.: The whole year! The whole year has been very good. And it’s really not necessarily being driven by newness, which is always important to us, but the classic end of the business has been very good for us. It’s a combination of the classic businesses being very strong, the ones that have been there for a long period of time, as well as newness.
WWD: There was some concern by fragrance vendors, initially, with the redo of the 59th Street beauty floor, with their change of location on the floor. Has that concern waned due to fragrance’s strong performance this year?
F.K.: To create better traffic within the department, we expanded aisles and created rooms within the main floor. With that, we had to relocate fragrances from where they had traditionally been. I think sometimes a new location is always an uncomfortable feeling. And at first it did struggle a little bit, but as we have cultivated and developed the business and as the brands became stronger, the business has really grown.
WWD: Are there any new Christmas promotions planned for accessories?
F.K.: Our Gift Giving Program — we have created some pop-up shops with items from three designers: Kate Spade, Michael Kors and Marc by Marc Jacobs, and pulled them all together, including small leather goods, handbags and jewelry. They are together in an environment in every one of our stores.
There are also accessories outposts that talk about what’s new and hot on our second floor and on Contemporary that are going to be changed out anywhere between two weeks and 30 days. We started out by featuring fur, which has been very successful despite the [warm] weather, and we’re going into technology and gift-giving in the next couple of weeks. Then, we’ll be doing a “shine” theme right before the New Year.
WWD: Within accessories, what is Bloomingdale’s most excited about?
F.K.: There are two categories, one of them being the shoe world. Shoes, in particular, is a business we have targeted over the last six or seven years for major expansion, renovation and additional square footage. We just finished something on the second floor, which was an update to something we had started six years ago, giving it additional square footage as we have done in a lot of our other stores. SoHo is going to be going under a lot of renovations in January and February, where we will expand the space and update all the furniture in the shoe department. A renovation in Short Hills [N.J.] is coming, too.
What’s working for us right now are the high shaft boots as well as the lace-up category and the Ugg business.
As we look forward to the spring season, we really believe a lot in color in all accessories, but that trend is new in the shoe world. It hasn’t been there for a couple of seasons.