NEW YORK — A move to Manhattan is only the beginning of a new phase for Nygård.
In May, the 38-year-old Winnipeg, Manitoba-based sportswear firm is shifting to 1435 Broadway, where Nygård’s new world headquarters will occupy all six floors of the building. Soon after, the company will add four more floors to the building, which will give it 30,000 square feet of space in total.
The move for Nygård, which generates 1 billion Canadian dollars, or $855.4 million at current exchange, at retail, means major expansion. According to Peter Nygård, the company’s chairman and founder, he will keep offices throughout Canada, but will move out of his current space at 1411 Broadway in May. The first six floors of the new building, which Nygård said he is designing himself, mainly will house the firm’s designers who create the clothing for the various collections it produces. The four additional floors will be for the company’s showrooms and some additional executive offices.
“I’m designing the space so it will be very open looking in a design-studio feeling with high ceilings — an atmosphere conducive for designing,” Nygård said. “There will be lots of working room with a lot of moving walls to accommodate the space and allow the product to be continually visible.”
Nygård said he only plans to move somewhere between 10 to 20 people to New York from Canada to head up the new office and plans are already in the works to hire about 50 more people to work there at the time of the opening. Currently there are 12,000 employees working for the company worldwide.
“The most significant reason we are moving to New York is to bring product to the market even faster than we do already,” Nygård said. “We are already known in Canada for being able to provide product at a fast pace, but the New York office will allow us to bring the fashion items to market even faster than we were before. It will give us a direct link to Shanghai, where we produce a great deal of our goods.”
Nygård said the new offices will be technologically advanced, with numerous plasma TV screens placed throughout the space. Those TVs, he said, will broadcast an array of information to designers, from the latest looks on the streets of Paris to the best-selling items at Dillard’s to what’s happening in the factories in Asia.
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“There will be an enormous number of screens set up,” Nygård explained. “They will display information in a stock-market kind of way. The latest hot sellers will pop up, the latest happenings in Europe, all sorts of relevant information. We will be known as a technological company that just happens to make clothing.”
The move also is accompanied by a massive retail rollout. The company already owns and operates 200 Nygård-branded stores throughout Canada, with another 10 stores spread across the U.S. Within the next three years, Nygård said he will open 100 more stores in Canada, which will bring in another 400 million Canadian dollars, or $342 million, in revenue for the company. “Once we secure our business in Canada, we will begin an even bigger expansion in the U.S.,” he said. “But that will come in time; we want to protect our own turf first and will never ignore where we came from.”
The company also runs its own stores within Dillard’s Canada and will expand its business in Dillard’s in the U.S. beginning with a new line, Peter Nygård Signature. The new collection, which will sell exclusively in 50 Dillard’s stores, will be showcased in the bridge area of the store beginning Feb. 15.
But that’s not the end of the expansion plans. Nygård already has several licensing deals for products ranging from accessories to home furnishings throughout Canada. The move to Manhattan also will bring a licensing division to the U.S.
“We are already in talks for licensing product in the U.S.,” he said. “But I imagine it will be a big part of the business we do in the U.S. as time goes on.”
Over the past 38 years, Nygård has turned his company into a state-of-the-art maker of branded and private label sportswear, with operations around the globe. Entering the U.S. market in 1978, Nygård’s revenues remain strongest in Canada.
Outside of his life in the apparel arena, Nygård is busy on other fronts. Currently, he is constructing the Nygård Heritage & Fashion Museum in Winnipeg’s Exchange District. The museum will showcase the small shed where he lived with his family when he first moved to Canada along with other memorabilia from the Nygård settlement.
Plans are also under way for the construction of Nygård Village in Winnipeg. The first part of the $80 million Village was the opening of a Nygård store and the TV studio space for the Nygård Fashion Network, which opened there in April. By 2009, the Village will house the new museum, residential lofts, fresh-food stalls and a two-block-long covered retail atrium.