Porsche’s Glamour Going Retail : Southland Store First for Auto Maker’s Luxury Items
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 in Costa Mesa 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 first Porsche Design Store is being opened by American Porsche Design, which is owned by the same German family that makes some of the world’s most sought-after sports cars.
American Porsche Design plans to open as many as 25 stores in the United States during the next five years and as many as 10 in Europe.
The firm, managed separately from the auto maker, has marketed some 90 retail products--including watches, sunglasses, briefcases and other fancy doodads--for the past five years.
Prices Start Near $75
The products are the creation of Ferdinand Alexander Porsche, grandson of the sports car firm’s founder and designer of the 911 and 904 model Porsche cars. 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 of the lenses instead of the top?
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 watches that start at about $150.
Most of the products have been available in the United States since 1983 at specialty stores such as Saks Fifth Avenue 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.
Glitzy Neighbors
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 as well as its location--virtually 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 for the company to see how well Orange County’s rich and famous spend their money before moving on to other upscale territories at sites still be to selected in such places as Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, Madison Avenue in New York, Union Square in San Francisco and Michigan Avenue in Chicago.
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’s 35 to 50 years old and makes “at least $100,000 a year,” said Ellis. “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.
