A ZIP Code just for shoes
This city is not easy on shoes.
The miles of unyielding sidewalks laced with subway grates, the lingering bumps of old cobblestone streets, the seeping asphalt in the summer -- all of it conspires to topple slim heels and shred soft Italian leather.
And yet New Yorkers are still drawn to the most impractical of footwear. (Carrie Bradshaw’s Manolo Blahnik obsession on “Sex and the City” resonated with women all over Manhattan.)
So perhaps it’s not surprising that Saks Fifth Avenue’s flagship store is opening an 8,500-square-foot designer shoe salon this summer that will feature 150% more shoes than the current showroom, a VIP room for private shopping, an in-house cobbler and a chocolate cafe.
More unexpected, however, is that the shoe department will have its own ZIP Code.
10022-SHOE -- both the salon’s name and its ZIP Code -- will take up most of the eighth floor of the Fifth Avenue store when it opens in August.
Saks executives came up with the idea when they were brainstorming how to market the expanded shoe department.
“Everybody kept saying, ‘You’ve got to come up with something that indicates it’s big,’ and there were a lot of mundane ideas,” said Terron Schaefer, Saks’ senior vice president, creative and marketing. “I thought, ‘Why not try to get a ZIP Code from the U.S. post office?’ Everyone said, ‘You’ll never get it.’ ”
But after a month of discussions, the U.S. Postal Service agreed to customize the last four digits of the store’s 10022 code with the word “SHOE” just for the salon -- the first time a single floor has received its own designated ZIP Code.
USPS spokeswoman Pat McGovern said the specialized ZIP Code, which did not cost Saks any money, is a pilot project that the Postal Service may offer other businesses in the future.
“This is something where mail can be used as a marketing tool,” McGovern said. “A ZIP Code is something that every person in America is familiar with. When ‘[Beverly Hills] 90210’ was on the air, everyone knew exactly what that was.”
There’s one catch, however: the Postal Service’s automatic sorting equipment reads only numbers, not letters, which means that the full ZIP Code won’t do much to help direct mail to the shoe salon.
“It’s really more part of the return address,” said McGovern, adding that upgraded equipment may be able to handle alphabetic ZIP Codes in the future.
Schaefer said he didn’t expect the salon to receive much mail anyway, except for maybe letters similar to those addressed to Santa Claus at the North Pole.
Indeed, shoe lovers said they were more excited about what the salon’s ZIP Code said about its size than the ability to send the store correspondence.
“If they made it bigger, that’d be great,” said Jennifer Martin, a 32-year-old dentist, who joked that she frequented Saks’ current fourth floor designer shoe salon so often that her husband thinks that she’s having an affair with one of the sales clerks.
With a good pair of shoes, “you can never feel fat,” said Martin as she fingered a pair of gold Jimmy Choo heels on a recent morning. “They change your whole outfit. You feel like you want to stand up straighter.”
Stay-at-home mom Rachel Oliver, 29, said New York women use shoes as an expression of themselves in the way that women in other cities signify their taste through what they drive.
“Because New York women don’t have cars, their shoes and their handbags tell you everything about them,” Oliver said as she pushed her baby’s stroller through the salon, browsing for espadrilles. “It’s sort of their way of communicating themselves without being behind the wheel of a car.”
But navigating the city in high-priced footwear requires a certain amount of strategy.
“New York women have their walking shoes, their going-out shoes, their working shoes,” said Carolyn Gusoff, a reporter for a local television station, as she paid for a pair of Christian Louboutin white fishnet sling-backs. “You know what kind of heel can endure what kind of day. Today, I knew I only had to walk from work to Saks and back to the car, so I can wear covered heels instead of cork heels.”
Nancy Wrublin, 54, has shoes for almost any scenario. The Long Island resident has so many pairs that she had custom glass shelves installed in her home to store them all.
“How many pairs of shoes do you think I have?” Wrublin asked a friend as they browsed near the Jimmy Choo display.
“Two hundred and fifty?” the friend offered.
“That’s upstairs,” Wrublin said. “But counting downstairs?”
“Oh, easily 500,” her friend replied.
“You put on a clever shoe, and it brings the whole outfit together,” Wrublin explained. “In the end, it’s really how you feel about yourself. Because you’re not sexy unless you feel sexy. And that’s really what a good shoe can do.”
