GREENWICH, Conn. — The average Wish List customer spends $1,500 at the beginning of a season and pops back into the store to spend $50 to $150 once a week.
She might refresh her wardrobe with Big Star or Hudson jeans, and is likely to buy the latest Juicy Couture — a rainbow of which adorns almost every wall of the store — or pick up a few more shrunken Lacoste T-shirts at $80 each.
She is 16 years old.
“I used to get a lot of price resistance, but I’m just not finding it anymore,” said Suzanne Zarrilli, co-owner of Wish List, the two-unit upscale teen store in Greenwich and Westport, Conn. “The prices just keep escalating. I remember the first pieces of Lacoste I had in the store, and I thought, ‘Nobody’s paying this much for a T-shirt.’ But they buy them six at a time.”
Zarrilli, a former merchandiser at DKNY, and business partner Carla Strobel, a Barneys New York veteran, are contenders in the booming teen luxury segment. They opened the Westport store in 1997, and the Greenwich store in 2003. They separate themselves from the competitive fray of moderate retailers such as Abercrombie & Fitch or Pacific Sunwear with their designer merchandise and personal shopping, and from more mature, cutting-edge retailers like Scoop NYC, with preppy, high school-friendly clothes.
Though reluctant to provide precise sales figures, the owners suggested that they brought in more than three times the national average in sales per square foot for contemporary retailers or “the same as what Scoop says they do.”
Retail analysts estimate specialty stores bring in about $500 per square foot, which would put Wish List at $1,500 per square foot. The two stores are each 2,000 square feet. Zarrilli and Strobel intend to expand their teen lifestyle platform soon, opening boutiques in other affluent suburbs across the country.
Price is not an object at these stores, though Zarrilli, who does the buying, supplies some moderately priced denim and tank tops. “You can’t insult them every time with a pair of $260 jeans,” she laughed.
Trendier items, however, can be a tough sell. Wish List girls will easily spend $160 on an embroidered Joystick T-shirt, or splurge on a $275 pair of Joe’s Denim pants, but they’re not likely to pick up a fashion-forward item off the rack, at least until they see it on a celebrity.
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Wish List consumers are preppy high schoolers who on a Friday afternoon will spend hours in the store’s seating areas sipping Starbucks and making their weekend plans on their cell phones — and shopping for whatever those engagements turn out to be.
Still, even with such a clotheshorse clientele in Greenwich and Westport, the kind of wealthy Connecticut towns that define preppy, Zarrilli and Strobel can only take so many risks with their merchandise. Boho trends are cleaned up for the displays, and embellishments are kept to a minimum. That doesn’t necessarily stop Zarrilli, who favors Dolce & Gabbana and Prada, from pushing the envelope on occasion. She will often buy collections for several seasons consecutively before customers start buying. For example, Antik Denim and 2B Free are still a little edgy for their customers, but she is stocking them nonetheless.
“My biggest challenge is not getting people to shop,” said Zarrilli, who was wearing a hot-pink tunic, oversized gold belt and Stitches distressed jeans. “My biggest challenge is everyone wanting to look the same. I don’t know if it’s Connecticut and we’re more conservative, but literally, the girls all like to look the same. Everyone wants the same jacket, or the same jeans.”
Of course, once a brand catches on, the “must-have” mentality of the teen shoppers creates runaway hits for the shop. Despite quotes from an eclectic group of women printed on the walls of the store, the teenagers and young women shopping in Wish List one afternoon this month wore a country-club-ready uniform of miniskirt, Michael Stars T-shirt, chunky necklace and stacked flip-flops, with the occasional pair of colorful velour sweatpants added to the mix.
If Zarrilli and Strobel have their way with their planned expansion, there may be more roomfuls of young Lacoste and Juicy disciples in the suburbs. They are looking for more locations, and although they didn’t disclose exactly where they want to open, the pair intend to pull away from the New York metropolitan area. The owners are also slowly building their online business, wishlistgirl.com, which sells 40 to 50 items seasonally and maintains 6,500 subscribers to its “Wish of the Week” e-mail.
“Suburban Chicago, Philadelphia, any affluent suburb would be a great place for us,” Zarrilli said. “We’d bring the same mix of merchandise and style there.”