A New Road for Porsche : South Coast Plaza to House Firm’s First-Ever Luxury-Item Retail Store
It’s vacation time, and you’re about to head off to Europe. Where are you going to get all those little necessities that you simply can’t make the trip without?
Not to worry. South Coast Plaza will soon have a place where you can pick up such essentials as a compass watch, billfolds with space for three currencies, and sunglasses for glacier skiers and sky divers.
The Porsche Design Store in Costa Mesa is being opened by American Porsche Design, a company founded by the German family responsible for some of the world’s most sought-after sports cars.
The Orange County store is the first of about 25 that the company plans to open in the United States during the next five years. The firm also hopes to open as many as 10 stores in Europe.
American Porsche Design sells no autos, but it has marketed about 90 products--including watches, sunglasses, briefcases and other fancy do-dads--for the past five years.
The products are the creation of Ferdinand Alexander Porsche, grandson of the German car firm’s founder, and designer of the 911 and 904 model autos. With a team of about a dozen designers in Switzerland, Porsche has come up with an impressive array of luxury toys.
Where else, for instance, can you pick up titanium mechanical pencils with self-advancing lead? Or a currency binder with three removable wallets--to sort out your deutsche marks, schillings and dollar bills? Or sunglasses with the wire frame at the bottom instead of the top--presumably making it easier for sky divers to look up at the sky?
Of course, all that glamour doesn’t come cheap. And the first Porsche retail store in the world is likely to also be one of the most expensive. Prices range from about $75 for a simple key case to more than $10,000 for some gold watches. In between is a black leather lounge chair ($6,000), wallets and pens (about $150 apiece) and other watches that start at about $150.
Most of the products have been available in this country since 1983 at specialty stores such as Saks or smaller upscale retailers.
The idea behind the expansion into Porsche Design Stores is to show off the products to both retailers and consumers, said James G. Ellis, president of American Porsche Design, at a press briefing Tuesday.
The price and variety of the merchandise “makes it impossible (for other retailers) to display the whole range of products,” Ellis said. “We want to give retailers a standard against which to operate.”
At the same time, Porsche Design hopes to “elevate the name with the public.”
To do that, the firm has chosen a 500-square-foot site at South Coast Plaza for its first store.
South Coast Plaza was chosen because of its affluent Orange County customer base, and the store will virtually be next door to Saks and in the same corridor with such glitzy international retailers as Gucci, Cartier and Louis Vuitton.
“Orange County will be a test. It’s a real microcosm of American society--everybody is there from the surfers to the blue-collar workers to millionaires,” Ellis said.
The idea is to see how well Orange County’s rich and famous spend their money before moving on to even more upscale territory with the opening of a flagship store at an undetermined larger location on Beverly Hills’ Rodeo Drive.
Ellis estimates that sales at its South Coast Plaza store eventually will hit an impressive $1,200 to $1,500 per square foot--which would put Porsche in the same league as its well-heeled competition in the mall.
American Porsche Design’s annual sales now hover at about $10 million. “We hope to pick up another 20% to 25% (in sales) during the first two years” of the new retail operation, Ellis said.
That means catering to the sort of customer who is 35 to 50 years old and makes “at least $100,000 a year,” Ellis said. “He wants quality in an understated way. But he’s beyond status because he’s already got it from 87 different directions.”
And now he’s got one more place to buy it.
