Printemps is a French luxury retail store with a very French name (it means “spring”). It has little brand recognition in the US, where local department stores from Saks to Macy’s to Nordstrom have fallen far from their heyday. Its first store in New York City is situated near Wall Street, in the Financial District — a world away from Fifth Avenue. How did anyone expect it to work?
“It’s a very difficult industry, the department store. I got here with a conviction that retail was far from being dead, because we are social animals and we like to shop, to eat, to be with friends. And in retail, we have the most beautiful stores, and Printemps is a super innovative brand,” said Jean-Marc Bellaiche, CEO of Printemps Group, speaking at the Vogue Business Global Summit in Lake Como last week.
Bellaiche spent years in strategy, first at Boston Consulting Group for two decades and then at Tiffany Co, along with some time in the world of tech startups. He joined Printemps in 2020, at the onset of the pandemic — since that period, Bellaiche said American customers at the Paris store have tripled. The company saw an opportunity to set up an outpost in New York, gaining an inroad into one of fashion’s most important markets, helping to drive more American foot traffic back to the store in Paris, and — ambitiously — filling a void left by the closure of Barneys, an event that has divided New York’s retail history into B.B. (Before Barneys) and A.B. (After Barneys).
“I knew that, potentially, if we opened something different, it could raise a lot of interest,” Bellaiche said.
Early responses have been positive. Printemps’s New York store uses the Art Deco architecture of the building it occupies to its advantage, creating a sensory experience as much as a shopping one. Queues have collected outside of the store simply to see it, particularly the shoe department, with 15-metre-high arched ceilings bathed in red. The space features five bars-slash-restaurants, which make up 35 per cent of overall sales. Twenty-five per cent of brands at Printemps New York aren’t sold anywhere else in the US. Bellaiche said that while early performance has exceeded expectations, he’s cautious of being the hot new thing in town that fades.
“The sales so far are very good — above our expectations. I want to be cautious because I know this market and New Yorkers have a tendency to get hot on something. And right now, we are the hot object. But I tell my team the real challenge is to remain at this level and to continue to grow,” said Bellaiche. “So I think we have to be humble. The first two months are above our expectations in a market that is difficult. But I would not say it’s a claim of success for a long time. For the long term, we need to continue to build it. Because of course when you open a store from scratch, you bring many new brands, some will resonate, some will not resonate. We need to be very agile with our offering.”
Bellaiche said Printemps has intentionally mixed large, famous brands with small, lesser known designers. “I think that balance in the first few weeks is really, really good for us,” he said. Collaborations with brands like Coperni and Saint James have also driven foot traffic.
And a significant amount of space is dedicated to a vintage collection, curated by an outside sourcer. It’s a way to tap into the consumer’s proclivity for vintage, while also showing off one-of-a-kinds as if they’re works of art. Bellaiche said that in the first two months, the top-selling “brand” in the New York store is its vintage collection. But how do brands feel about secondhand wares sitting alongside new goods — especially when people are gravitating towards the old?
“Most of the brands recognise that this is a strength in the market, a force in the market, and you cannot go against it. And they all respect the way we do it, which is every piece is selected, every piece is curated, it’s clean, all the pieces are unique,” said Bellaiche. “Of course, there are some brands that we’ve decided ourselves not to operate as part of secondhand, because some of them don’t like this business, and we respect that.”
Bellaiche said that tariffs and rising trade barriers haven’t dimmed Printemps’s outlook in the US, spare for its plans to launch an e-commerce site, though he only sees prices needing to rise incrementally. He said his approach to retail remains the same: slow and intentional, with stores that act as destinations. “The era of over-retailing is over,” he said. “When you open a store abroad, first you have to be very humble, because it’s difficult to succeed when those markets are very local — so you need to do it with local people. In New York, we open with New Yorkers, not with Parisians that we’ve flown in, because it’s impossible.”
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