Space NK adds Nordstrom shops-in-shops including South Coast Plaza location
Space NK is bringing more beauty to North America. The luxury retailer has plans for four Nordstrom-based shops-in-shops as well as a new stand-alone shop in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, slated for November.
It’s also launching several new product lines in stores, including Surratt Beauty, Allies of Skin, T’zikal and Immunocologie. The new locations are part of Space NK’s heightened focus on North America. It opened its first San Francisco location on Fillmore Street in late August, and a shops-in-shop in the Vancouver, British Columbia, Nordstrom last fall. The retailer also has 18 shops-in-shops in Bloomingdale’s.
“We entered into an agreement with Nordstrom about a year ago…it was to test a concept of Space NK in Nordstrom. [It is] a different concept than what we do in Bloomingdale’s, and a different concept than what we do in our freestanding stores,” said Noah Rosenblatt, Space NK managing director. “[Space NK] has always been known as an incubator for global emerging brands. [The agreement] allow[s] us to really be the purveyor of beauty in those emerging brands to Nordstrom…so what we’ve done is put in 20 to 25 of what we’d consider to be our best emerging beauty brands in this shops-in-shop in Vancouver. It highlights skin care, color cosmetics and hair care.”
“We were in test mode for a while,” Rosenblatt added.
The four new Nordstrom shops-in-shops will be located in Toronto, in Eaton Centre and Yorkdale, as well as in Costa Mesa, Calif. at South Coast Plaza and in Austin, Texas, at The Domain. The Eaton Centre and South Coast Plaza locations will open in September, and the Yorkdale and Domain outposts are slated for October, according to Rosenblatt. In addition to the Nordstrom partnerships, Space NK plans to open the Williamsburg location in mid-to-late November on the corner of Bedford Avenue and North 4th Street, according to the company.
Space NK expects to cement a few new additional brands for an October launch, and will carry a handful of exclusive products this fall, including Kane NY Serum Savant Primer and Kevyn Aucoin The Making Eyes Kit. In September, the retailer will also expand its Rodial presentation to include the brand’s cosmetics line, the company said.
The partnership with Nordstrom allows certain brands, like By Terry and Oribe, first-time access to the department store, according to Rosenblatt. “We’ll be giving them the presence they’ve never had in Nordstrom,” he said.
The goal of the new locations is to test the markets.
“Each one is going to give us a really good understanding of the market,” Rosenblatt said. “There’s a Canadian-awareness factor that we’ll get.”
The South Coast Plaza location, which also hosts a Space NK Bloomingdale’s shops-in-shop, will give Space NK the ability to test how well it can do with multiple stores under the same roof, Rosenblatt said, while the Austin location will be the retailer’s first venture into that market. “The Texas market has always been a very strong online market for us, and this will be our first real understanding of the Texas market,” said Rosenblatt.
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