Dive Brief:
- Urban Outfitters is extending its new store concept to more cities, following debuts in Houston and Glendale, California, the apparel retailer announced last week. The format features a “brighter, more modern, and flexible design.”
- By the end of this year, the concept will expand to Bethesda, Maryland, and next year seven more stores will get the new treatment. They will include both street and mall locations.
- Market research based on “the brand’s community of highly engaged Gen Z shoppers” shaped each store’s highly localized approach. Beauty assortments and several of the retailer’s private labels are also being expanded and elevated.
Dive Insight:
Merchandising at these stores will take local shopping behavior and preferences into account, and the “new format gives us the freedom to shape our stores around our customers, their lifestyle, and the moments that matter most to them,” Urban Outfitters President Shea Jensen said in a statement.
The brand, like its sibling Anthropologie, has a long track record of inviting store environments in often idiosyncratic spaces, according to Lee Peterson, WD Partners’ executive vice president of thought leadership. That’s more easily accomplished on a streetscape than in a mall, but it can be done, he said.
So far, images of the store concept as designed for Urban Outfitters’ Glendale Galleria location suggest that the brand is opting to take a less edgy approach, resembling rivals like Gap, he warned. Jensen’s 30-plus-year tenure at Nordstrom may have informed the option of tidier, well-lit merchandising.
“It’s too early to hyper-criticize, but I actually was surprised,” he said by phone. “I think they’ve always been the most innovative brand in their ilk, so why would you want to create something as normal-looking as everybody else?”
Gen Z likes vintage and secondhand stores in part because of their treasure hunt atmosphere and individual aesthetic, according to Peterson.
“Making shopping easier is kind of not what Gen Z is all about,” he said.
Urban Outfitters is applying the store redesign to street-level as well as mall stores, citing research that Gen Z is driving traffic to malls. Nearly three-quarters of Gen Z consumers shop at malls, which are the generation’s “most popular in-person shopping destination,” per the company’s press release.
But Peterson pushed back against this contention, saying, “They do go there, but everybody goes to the mall every once in a while.”