Banana Republic Opens New Flagship in San Francisco

[Alpha8472]

The new slimmed down Flagship opens in downtown at Union Square. This new store seems to feature mostly furniture. Furniture stores are profitable and it is difficult to steal heavy furniture in a grab and run.

Furniture is the retail wave of the future. Why sell clothes at all?

https://chainstoreage.com/banana-repubi ... w-flagship

[buckguy]

Furniture has not been faring so well:

https://www.furnituretoday.com/financia ... arter-dip/
https://businessofhome.com/articles/mit ... iquidation

[storewanderer]

This is a curious decision especially with the Ikea opening.

At least they're rescuing one of the numerous vacant storefronts in the area and trying something?

[ClownLoach]

Banana Republic recently built a few very, very lavish and expensive two story flagship stores that were approximately 10,000 Sq ft including South Coast Plaza. These had strange entrance "hallways" along a glassed-in "runway" of mall showcase windows, and then the store ran front to back in separate rooms with a staircase between both floors. I can't imagine how much it cost them to line up vacancies above and below there, plus the cost to cut through the old existing mall to create the staircase. Surely this store cost tens of millions, and I cannot imagine that even with the funky entrance it wasn't a shrink nightmare with this layout like the hall in a hotel with everything in rooms to the left and right. No sight lines at all for the employees and the checkout was at the back wall of the store. It closed recently.

The fact that they are willing to spend such a preposterous amount of money on these Gigantic flagship stores, only to close a few years later, and then go at it again in places like San Francisco shows how inept this company is. Why would you spend the money on their supposedly "premium" brand when they sell their clothing at Costco and Sam's Club? Same logo for a tenth of the price.

At least looking at the picture they learned to create a shop where employees can see from one end to the other for shrink purposes... Not that it'll stop the drug crazed folks there, and not like they can stop anyone either...

[rwsandiego]

When I think "Banana Republic," "furniture" doesn't come to mind, just like "wool suit pants" don't come to mind when I think "West Elm."

BR needs to abandon this foolishness and focus on improving their low-quality/high-price clothing. Their merchandise used to be "premium," but that ship sailed years ago.