Fred Segal at LAX
The storied and celebrity beloved Fred Segal is making major changes. While the brand is shutting down half of its Santa Monica location (due to leasing issues, the 500 Broadway building is being completely redone), Sandow, which acquired Fred Segal’s intellectual property in 2012, is planning to bring the brand to a wider audience across the globe. Within the year, Adam Sandow plans on opening at least one Fred Segal lifestyle center outside of Los Angeles, with more to follow under the leadership of Paul Blum, most recently CEO of Juicy Couture, and prior, David Yurman and Kenneth Cole Productions.
“We thought there was this incredible piece of intellectual property that had remained authentic and true and had all of this incredible history,” Sandow told WWD. “What happened is we had a tremendous response. There were more people wanting the license than we could handle or we felt comfortable giving.”
Adam Sandow
When Sandow acquired Fred Segal in 2012, he announced that he would be taking Fred Segal into licensing, offering a range of clothing and home accessories under the Fred Segal name. But that changed when he began to delve deeper into the retail world of Fred Segal, opening a spot inside LAX’s Tom Bradley International Terminal as well as partnering with the SLS Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas (the Fred Segal Collective will be the only retail location on the resort’s property and will occupy a whopping 10,000 square feet) and Japan’s Mark Styler (Fred Segal Tokyo is set to open in 2015). Instead of creating a new brand under the Fred Segal moniker, Sandow decided to build a lifestyle. He brought in Paul Blum to oversee the expansion and expects to open a handful of huge lifestyle centers in the US and abroad within the next five to seven years.
Much like Fred Segal’s location on Melrose, the new lifestyle centers will blend retail with Ron Robinson, dining and more, including new wellness and fitness experiences. Think of it as a one-stop shop where you can pick up the latest from Ann Demeulemeester before a hot yoga session and a lunch at Umami Burger with your best friends — in short, Sandow is bringing the L.A. lifestyle to the world in a glossy package that’s fit for Instagram feeds. The lifestyle centers will all be individually designed, instead of having a cookie-cutter template, and could even include salons and more in addition to the shop-in-shop concept that Fred Segal pioneered.
In addition to the new lifestyle centers, Sandow and Blum will introduce e-commerce, which hasn’t been a focus of Fred Segal, even in today’s world of online gratification. Blum sees the new Fred Segal concept as a way to nurture new talent in the world of fashion and beauty as well as offer a unique environment for established labels to experiment with retail.
Images courtesy WWD
