Why Some Retailers are Ignoring the Internet

(upbeat music) - Hello and welcome to the debrief from the Business of Fashion, where each week we delve into our most popular B.O.F. professional stories with the correspondence who created them. I'm Senior Correspondent Shina Butler Young. - And I'm Executive Editor Brian Baskin. If you're in New York and looking to discover the next great Japanese menswear brand or the latest quiet luxury offerings from the row, then space is a must visit. And I mean that literally. Chris Green's two-year-old story in Carol Gardens, online presence is minimal. Its website is a simple list of brands with no e-commerce and its social media consists of an infrequently updated Instagram account. - Then space is one of a growing number of stories rejecting the idea that online shopping is the future of fashion retail. They see a curated, friendly and person experience the key to success. Their customers would agree. And the strategy is getting more attention after the high profile struggles of luxury e-commerce sites like Metaporte and Essence. - With us to discuss is B.O.F. Austin Kim, who spoke with Green and other store owners who say e-commerce, who needs it. Austin, welcome to the debrief. - Hi Shina, hi Brian, I'm excited to be here. - So Austin, you actually just joined B.O.F. And this is your first story, so congrats on that. - Thank you. - So when we start with how you came across this idea, certainly you were in school and TikTok and discovered stores that are not online. How did you come across Venn Space and the other brands in the story? - Well Venn Space was really the catalyst for this entire story. I just heard like murmurs of this store out in Brooklyn and a lot of like the menswear circles I follow online or a bunch of friends I have that are also in the fashion had been talking about this kind of like mythic store that carries all like the best menswear brands right now. And so right when I joined B.O.F. a few weeks ago actually the first store I visited for an interview was Venn Space and immediately when I went there I knew it was a story and you can read it in the lead of my article. Just interacting with Chris Green and interacting with his sales associates was such a compelling experience. I knew this was something special. - Yeah, the story starts out with Green just like sitting outside the store, talking to everyone who passes by and he seems to know the mobile name, right? - Yeah, I think he lives down the street actually and he lives with his mother-in-law who walks by randomly during our interview. A few of his customers come by too, not even to go into the store, they're just walking down the street also. - My favorite other detail is that if you call the store's phone number it's actually his personal cell. - Yeah, it's a really personal experience the whole way through. I was telling one of my friends like Chris Green is almost like a Mr. Rogers if you wore Dries Van Noten in Aprese. - That's funny because I was listening to it when Brian was talking through his opening, I was thinking this sounds like everything you do wrong. In 2026 your Instagram's not updated regularly. They don't have a real office phone. The website you can't actually transact. Talked us a little bit more about what's so special about how he's set up the store because certainly there's other boutiques like we're at Brian and I live in and the suburbs of New Jersey. There are a few personal boutiques without not doing numbers or that are not interesting enough to be a B.O.F. lead. Like what's it out to you? - I think it is all in the product curation. I mean Chris Green has been working in retail for the past two decades I believe. He has five years as merchandise manager at TotaCayo and needs supply under his belt. He knows product and he knows fashion and that really shows through in what he sells in his store. He described it basically as he buys for himself. Like it's all his personal taste and that perspective is exactly what I think customers connect with. They trust him and they want to buy into how he views the world. And that experience is pretty relevant to the whole question of whether to do e-commerce as well right because he went down that road at TotaCayo and it didn't end well. - Yeah I mean TotaCayo and needs supply are really interesting because they actually adopted e-commerce far before a lot of these big e-commerce players entered. I think needs supply started its website in like 2008. So it predates a lot of its competitors but he experienced that price competition, the high cost customer acquisition. He experienced that all during his tenure at these brands. Did you find that was a common thread with all the store owners you talked to that they just saw e-commerce as a grind and not worth the effort? - I think partially that but even talking to Laura Baker who owns Dot Reader out in Montclair, New Jersey and then also a location in the West Village. I asked her why did you open this West Village location in 2023 when you could have directed those funds to a website and she admitted she just does not have any experience or knowledge of how to run e-commerce. So it's different for every business owner but at the end of the day these small businesses are people doing what they love and what they don't love as e-commerce and they have no interest in it. - It's almost like that idea of what's old is new again in some ways that there was much to do in the 20 turns about the rise of e-commerce and then suddenly it's like in particular I think that Gen Z and maybe Younger Millennials are almost rediscovering the store experience. I love what the analyst Simi and Seagal said in your story which I thought was curious. It was a curious thing when he said that the best customer is an in-store customer. It made me think of like traditional retail old school sit and fit. Do you believe that? How much of that is really true that the best customer is the one that's in the store? - Well I think he's approaching it from like an emotional side and then also a financial side. The emotional thing is you're able to build rapport with the customer. The customer sees you as a person and knows that this product is coming from somebody not just like a warehouse. And then the financial side Simi and explained that the customer basically absorbs all this cost of fulfillment. So when you place an order online someone has to walk in that warehouse, package the pair of pants you bought, then ship it out to you and then maybe you return it and then it all happens again. But in the store the customer takes the pair of jeans off the rack, walks it over to the cash register and then takes it home to themselves. So the costs associated with the brick and mortar are just completely different than the costs associated with e-commerce. - I feel like we're talking ourselves into thinking e-commerce is never a good idea. But I mean, you say these things. - I don't agree with that at all. I think it works for many reasons actually. - Yeah, well let's talk about that though. I mean what are these stores giving up by not having e-commerce? - Well it obviously reaches the most important thing. Their audience is so not small, it is small. Like their audience are these neighborhoods. They're stuck in Montclair, they're stuck in Carol Garland's and they're not. - I live in Montclair, I kinda write. (laughing) I resent you. - What do you mean stuck? - Nothing wrong with being stuck in Montclair. - Definitely. But you still have, if you're not from there you have to trek out to X place to get there. So they're definitely limiting themselves in that way. But I think a lot of these business owners don't see that as a limitation to them. That's just the name of the game. - It makes me think of when a lot of large traditional retailers tried to do this hyper local neighborhood version of their big brick and mortar and it didn't really work. I bet as you've already said in the story and said here, like the secret sauces that you have to feel like a local fixture, like the owner of Venspace and other small stores you talk to, is that part of the sauce? It has to feel that way. It can't be, I don't know, Macy's opening a small hyper local which Nordstrom also did the same thing. Is it that the person is a part of the neighborhood? Like you said, Chris Green, you know, was in that neighborhood for years. His mother-in-law, he lives with on the corner and he's just sitting there as that part, is that really the key here too in addition to the product? 'Cause it doesn't work for big retailers, it seems. - I think so. I guess what I had in mind though for big retailers is even like Barnes and Noble, which is not a fashion brand, but this year they're opening 60 brick and mortar stores and their whole strategy is localizing them, making like the layouts of each store unique and the product is sort of unique. And I think Bloomingdale's is going down the same path right now. So I think big, bigger retailers are adjusting to this sort of thing and I'm not sure how successful they'll be, but I think they are tuned into what consumers want. - Yeah, it's hard though to match that level of local knowledge. I went and checked out.reader yesterday 'cause we're both stuck in Montclair, so I figured why not. And one of the sales associates was telling me that she worked in fashion and she was all over the place. But she actually grew up down the street from the store and she back then when she was a child, it was an art store and she used to play in the basement and paint down there. And we went down there and now it's where they keep their stuff that's on sale and there were still paint splatters on the floor and it's just this full circle moment where you're like, you just so rarely see that in retail that the sales associate is so engaged with the story behind the store and the neighborhood and just knows everything about it. I mean, it was really incredible to see. - Yeah, I think like the narratives that customers are able to build around what they buy is so important. Like if you bought something from Dotreader, then you'll always have that memory attached to the clothes and that you just can't replicate I think at a big business level. - Can we also talk about some of the Instagram comments in particular on this story? And I know Brian got a kick out of a few of them, but people also are really buying into maybe feeling they have a relationship with a lot of these stores. It's really true. And by the way, as Brian was talking about his experience yesterday at the store, I was thinking about a conversation I had with an executive this week around hiring trends at large companies. Like it's very hard for a large company to market a message around being hyper local and then find the right talent that can replicate what Brian described in the story. like people have to really buy in and that seems harder to do. - I mean, just for some context here, this was one of our, probably one of the most engaged with stories on Instagram that we published in a while. There currently are 283 comments and about 15,000 likes and pretty much every comment reads like one of the first ones on here which is Beach Boutique Miami. I assume it's a boutique on the Beach in Miami and they said, "Love this, it's all about connecting with our clients, our friends, they're like family." And there must be a hundred comments like that from different store owners or even customers saying that exact same thing. Austin, is that kind of the vibe you got when you were talking to the store owners in this story as well? - Yeah, I mean, Chris Green is so enamored with the business he's set up and he believes in it so strongly and that comes across in the quotes in the story and just throughout my whole conversation with him. Like, I think everyone that shops at these stores or runs a store like this, they believe in the product, they believe in the people they bring together. It's a whole community thing and I was really impressed by those comments as well. How connected people felt to this story into this idea. - Let's talk about these stores are actually selling. I mean, talk about the product mix for these stores and how they're catering to this chosen family that they've created. - Yeah, I think Venspace speaks to the modern male consumer that's really until the high touch, maybe quiet, luxury, aesthetic. So they're carrying a lot of the Japanese designers, like Orally, Oppresset and then classic brands like Casey Casey and Driesman Noten. I think outline carries a similar mix but focused for women's wear and then Dot Reader is, I'm less familiar with the brand they carry and they're less catered to maybe me as an audience but I know they carry like common projects in Laura Baker, the owner of the store was talking about 6397 jeans, which I had mentioned the West Village Girls story by the cut when she opened her store and she said she sold all the West Village Girls their jeans which I thought was really funny. - Yeah, I can report back. I checked them out as I mentioned and yeah, there was definitely a lot of that brand and mother denim as well. And then, you know, Ula Johnson, Rachel Comey, but then some interesting like smaller international brands. There were some Japanese brands, there was a Turkish brand. It was stuff that I'm not sure you'd be able to find anywhere else certainly in Mount Clare, you know, where the original store is which was quite interesting. It was like a little, it was a lot of that kind of like quiet luxury or like slouchy preppy kind of look that I think people would go for in the suburbs but it was a little more adventurous than I think you'd normally see in a store like that. - Yeah, and I think that's a really big selling point of these are clothes you can't find anywhere else. One really cool brand at Venn Space is this small brand called Of Nothing. You probably have never heard of it because it's only stocked at Venn Space and it's only stocked at Venn Space because this brand was started three years ago and Jack Fullerton, the founder of it, got this account by walking into the store wearing his own clothing and made a relationship with Chris Green and was able to then get stocked there and he basically made his whole first collection for the store himself in his studio and only recently switched to a manufacturer. So it is like down to the brand level, it's so organic and it's so authentic. - Yeah, I thought that it was also interesting in your story you talked about them even going back to analog marketing. One of the other retails you spoke to are gonna do like print catalogs. The last time I heard of a print catalog was probably when my mom ordered me luggage in JC Penney's catalog for middle school. Talk to us about how they're marketing beyond just the word of mouth 'cause they're actually thinking of other more traditional forms there too. - Yeah, so the story you're referring to is outline in Brooklyn. They had e-commerce actually from 2024 to 2025 and then decided to shut it down because in the story there's a quote where one of the co-founders Margaret Austin just describes it as unsexy and they pivoted to this print catalog last year. So they're actually only on their third edition right now but there's really just beautiful magazine quality catalogs with amazing imagery of their clothing. The other co-founder Hannah Reek has a background in editorial I believe so that's why it feels so professional. And it is a really great strategy honestly because we all are so exhausted by how much content we see every day. I mean, it's so hard to stick out online unless you're paying to be placed at the top of a Google search or Instagram ads. And so to get something delivered to your door as a reminder to come check out the story again this season is an amazing strategy. The other sort of question I kept asking throughout is like how much can you push this from like a revenue and sales perspective, right? Like, are you gonna just stop at a store? Is this all about slow, sustainable one store growth or is there more opportunity? I believe it was Chris Green that talked about at some point he might have his own private label brand that could go online. What are the limitations of this model? - That's a question I've been thinking about since starting the story and still am. I mean, scale is interesting because we had talked a lot about like TJX who owns like TJ Maxx and TK Maxx out in Europe which is the largest apparel retailer in North America and one of the largest internationally. And their e-commerce is negligible to their business. So clearly brick and mortar works and obviously at a higher price point it's a different story but I think it's even more compelling at a higher price point. So I don't know what the solution to scale is but it clearly works and people are excited to go in stores and shop. - I had that same question though, especially about Ben's face if they've been getting so much buzz. I mean, since reading your story and like them really getting on my radar, I suddenly started noticing their reference to everywhere and you have to wonder must be so tempting to capitalize on that and really try to scale up. But again, as you pointed out, like in the story, he's done that before. I think he knows where that road can go. I mean, what is the danger of trying to grow too fast? - Well, I think what Chris Green learned at Needs Apply and Tota Coyote was just, you lose the soul of a business really quickly as you scale, especially scale on e-commerce. Needs Apply and Tota Coyote kind of before my time 'cause I'm younger Gen Z. But what Green had it swing to me. - Thank you for that, thanks for that reminder, Austin. - He's still in college, folks. - I don't think he's graduated yet. - No, I haven't. (laughs) But what Chris Green had learned at these companies is that what had started as these like really novel specialty local retailers, suddenly while you're chasing this international audience, then you're trying to buy an assortment that suits an international audience, which is you're just buying everything that you can sell rather than having this perspective that customers really connect with. And so you lose the magic of retail really quickly, I believe. And it's a talent conversation. I go back to what I was mentioning earlier in my conversation with an executive this week. Literally the quote they said was, "I have to think about everything I say publicly or whether it's to shareholders or to just add a dinner table about what our values are as a company. Because once I say it, I have to be sure that every single person on the sales floor is going to live that." And I think it's very hard to do when you scale. So if you want to be hyper local and the kind of story of people walking off the street and have a conversation, know your name or know the name of your customers, you've got to make sure everyone you hire is going to be able to give that experience. I think that gets very hard as you get bigger. You can't be Chris Green in every store. Yeah, and I think the other really special thing is that green or baker of Dot Reader, all of these stores, the buying and merchandising is led by them. I think they are also the sole people that lead these operations, which is really special. I think I have the slightest amount of background in buying and merchandising. And I walk into a store now and it feels so contrived a lot of the times. I know that the rack of clothes I'm staring at someone had like a three hour board reading talking about how they'll situate them visually in the store or why they're there and why they're positioned this way. That is so not compelling to me anymore. And I think to a lot of shoppers, they feel the same way. But walking into stores like VennSpace or Dot Reader, I know these clothes came from this person and they can explain to me why they chose them and it feels really personal. Yeah, and at Dot Reader, I brought a friend of mine 'cause who's more the target audience, she's a woman first of all. And the only sale woman's clothing for context. And just to see how did the sales associate talk about the clothes and you really saw that that intimate knowledge of this is why we're selling this. And also she tried something on and it wasn't working and they explained exactly here's how to style this. Here's the type of pieces to use. They just knew and it was like a random thing she picked out. They hadn't suggested it to her. They just knew every piece of clothing in that store and I think you're right, like at most stores, there's a level of knowledge, like this is not unique to these kind of stores, but that depth and intimacy feels different when it's your whole business. Definitely. We'll be back with more of the debrief right after this. I remember a time when all the big department stores were talking about these hyper local things. It feels like it's coming back around. Are we on to something that big retailers will actually be able to replicate or learn something from? - I had asked this question actually to Simion Seagull and then also Chris Green, at phrasing it somewhere, like, oh, is this the future of retail? And they both kind of laughed at me. I think because my ignorance of being such a digitally native person, I mean, I grew up shopping on like Supreme drops every Thursday in the back of the house. of pre-calculus class on my laptop. I had assumed shopping always had to be online, or like e-commerce always had to be a core part of your business. But what, so they had kind of laughed at me in that, like retail has been in person since the start of mankind or even like the original department stores of like in North America and like the late 1800s. Like retail has always been a physical in person transaction and technology, what Simeon had offered is that like technology is not going to transform retail. Technology will like optimize and make retail more efficient. And I think that's true that like customers now, I think like 80% of customers shop online and install at the same time even. Like they're checking the product once they find it in store on their phones. And so there's these new ways that we can like leverage e-commerce or leverage technology, but it certainly won't change the core part of what retail is. - So what is old is new again, maybe. Brian, do you think this is a shift or just like another like ebb and flow of? - I do think it's a shift. I don't think we're going ahead to a day when every store is like Venn space. But you know, for this story like when Austin was reporting it, I was, we were talking about the share of e-commerce of retail as a whole and it had been climbing pretty steadily. Like basically like it was swallowing like a percentage a year of overall retail in the US for years and years and years. And then post pandemic, it's basically leveled off at about 16%. Which is first of all lower than you'd expect. And also that trajectory just didn't hold true. It wasn't just going to rise a percent a year until it hit 100. And it is because of exactly what Austin said. There is just this like primal need to actually touch things before you buy them sometimes and human interaction and these values that haven't gone away. And then I think people are realizing now they kind of miss when they're gone. Yeah, I mean, hearing these business owners talk about how much they dislike e-commerce, but also talking to consumers like, I don't know do you two shop online often because everyone else offered like that they hate shopping online. They hate the return process. They hate all like the waiting and XYZ component of it. For clothes, I probably don't shop online a whole lot. I think it for basics or things that I know my size and I just want to replace something sure. But yeah, lots of in store shopping. I think I also just kind of in Brian can weigh in on that as well. But I think I'm also agreeing with both of you in terms of whether this is a shift or not. I think I'm somewhere in the middle, like agreeing with both of you but somewhere in the middle. Where I think that these kinds of stores have always been important. You're hearing more about it because I think your cohort in particular Austin Gen Z are really craving for in the age of AI something different. And so the conversation around these experiences are louder, but I think they've always sort of been there. We were gonna land in the middle at some point anyways. I do, I do a mix of both. I will shop online, but I will say that the clothes I have the most emotional attachment to are the ones that I bought in person. Because you do, you remember that experience. Like I think of the brand Alex Mill, which is sort of a modern classic, you know, it's Mickey Drexler. Like he obviously like retail legend. And you know, is a modern example of like a really well-run store. Basically a friendly service, you know, good selection, all that. And you know, every time I've gone in that, I bought stuff online from them and in store. And when I go in store, you know, you talk to the sales associates, they're really friendly. You never know what you're gonna talk about. They'll suggest stuff. And like I can actually tell you in my closet, like the stuff I bought from them online, and the stuff I bought in store, and like how I feel about it. Like it's funny how that works on this like sub-conscious level. - Yeah, and also talking about Gen Z is interesting because considering like the pandemic disruptions of physical retail, I think what a lot of my generation lost out on is this like, one person I spoke to you for the story offered, like the record store experience, where you like go hang out at the record store and someone shares their favorite records with you or like the skate shop and they teach you all the cool, skate culture. Like my people, my age are learning to go outside again, which I think we've seen manifest in like the third space epidemic of like everyone needs a coffee shop. But I think what these stores proposes like, you don't need to build a coffee shop to create a third space, like good enough product assortment, we'll bring people to your store and give enough reason to hang out in the store. - It's very true. Austin, thank you so much for joining us today. - Yeah, thank you so much for having me. - Please be sure to check out Austin's article, meet the retailer succeeding by ignoring the internet at businessofashion.com and keep an eye out for more of his brilliant writing to come. These and other stories are available to be or to our professional subscribers only, and you can find the links in the episode notes. You've been listening to the debrief, produced and edited by Olivia Davies, I'm Shina Butler Young. - And I'm Brian Vaskin. We'll be back next week with a new episode. Thanks so much for joining us and be sure to follow us wherever you get your podcasts.