MILAN — Moscow department store Tsum is celebrating its 110th anniversary this year.
During a press conference held here Monday morning, the last day of Milan Women’s Fashion Week, Tsum general manager Alexander Pavlov said that an event will be hosted in Moscow in June to celebrate the anniversary.
“We want to bring people from all over the world to Moscow. We will bring them to the Bolshoi Theatre, we will show them the city and also what Tsum is,” said Pavlov. The department store will involve a range of international brands in the celebrations. “Labels and designers will design special products for the fall season,” Pavlov said.
Founded by Scottish merchants Andrew Muir and Archibald Mirrielees in 1907, the department store was renamed Tsum after the February Russian Revolution. Spanning over 753,473 square feet, Tsum was acquired in 2002 by Russia’s luxury distributor Mercury Group.
The department store carries leading luxury fashion labels, as well as a wide selection of jewelry, watches, homeware and premium beauty brands.
“We are enlarging our shop in shop of Bottega Veneta on Tsum’s ground floor with accessories,” said fashion director Alla Verber.
Although he declined to provide financial figures, Pavlov said that Tsum, which aligned its prices to European department stores, doubled its buying budgets over the last two years. “And we continue to increase them,” he added.
In order to provide a more efficient shopping experience to tourists — “they are mainly Chinese but we also welcome people from the Middle East and Western Europe,” Pavlov said — the department store is about to debut a tax refund system developed in collaboration with the Russian government.
Along with controlling Tsum, Mercury Group, which was established in 1993 by Leonid Fridlyand and Leonid Strunin, also operates the DLT Tsum department store in St. Petersburg and the Tretyakovsky Proyezd shopping arcade, as well as the Barvikha Luxury Village founded in 2005.