Will Valley Girls Shop at Bloomingdale’s?

Bloomingdale’s, the venerable East Coast retailer, will swing open its doors in the San Fernando Valley this weekend, and amid the hype and hoopla, a question will be raised:

Can the land of the Valley Girl, where mall shoppers are stereotyped as vacuous teenagers with bad grammar, be a successful market for an upper-crust department store with New York roots?

Fer sure.

“The reality is there are a lot of upscale people who live in the Valley,” said Ira Kalish, senior economist at Management Horizons, the retail consulting division of Price Waterhouse. “Look at Encino. A lot of movie stars live there.”

“I think it’s going to play to a receptive audience,” said analyst David Poneman of the investment firm Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. in New York.

“The cultural sensibilities of New York theater, which Bloomingdale’s has been able to ally itself with in New York, are complimentary to those of Hollywood.”

And if Sherman Oaks isn’t part of Hollywood, what is?

The new store will feature Armani shops for men and women and is the only Bloomingdale’s in Southern California with a separate Gucci department. It even offers a studio-services business that will dress movie and television celebrities.

Still, of all the Bloomingdale’s in California, the Sherman Oaks location may be the least obvious fit for the tony retailer and might pose the biggest challenge, said Richard Giss, a partner in the retail trade services group at the accounting firm Deloitte & Touche.

While the store will probably draw well-heeled customers from Thousand Oaks to Pasadena, the pockets of affluence in the Valley region are interspersed with lower-income areas.

“This is a real test to see if the concept has legs throughout Southern California,” he said.

That test begins today, as the retailer opens its doors to allow credit-card customers in for a special “pre-opening” shopping day. On Saturday, the grand opening will be staged with all the requisite flourishes, including local luminaries, a marching band and a ribbon-cutting ceremony.

The debut of the Sherman Oaks store follows the opening last week of a Bloomingdale’s in Century City and another on Thursday in Newport Beach. The fourth Bloomingdale’s planned for Southern California will open at the Beverly Center in March.

Bloomingdale’s is expecting Southern California to be a highly successful market.

It would be unrealistic to hope that any department store here would reach the stratospheric $500 million in annual sales of the flagship Bloomingdale’s store in Manhattan. But $60 million to $80 million--the range usually achieved by a “big” store like Nordstrom--is well within reach, analysts say. And sales at the four Southern California Bloomingdale’s could easily surpass that level, they add.

While Sherman Oaks might be a less obvious choice for a Bloomingdale’s than Century City or Newport Beach, the retailer has high hopes for the store. Michael Lindblad, Bloomingdale’s regional vice president of stores, believes the Valley was practically begging for a retailer that caters to the higher end of the market.

“When I look at what used to be at the Promenade in Woodland Hills and what used to be in the Fashion Square in Sherman Oaks, both were fashion centers for the Valley,” Lindblad said. “From I. Magnin to Saks to a fine Bullock’s store and a fine Robinson’s store, they’ve now either gone away or homogenized into something more moderate.

“We believe we’ll bring that fashion center back to the Valley.”

Certainly, Bloomingdale’s will be well received initially, particularly by the area’s many transplanted Easterners. Though the chain has been deluged with new credit card applications, a surprising number of Southern Californians were already Bloomie’s charge customers--because they travel frequently or buy from the retailer’s mail-order catalog.

The chain is also blessed with good timing. The upscale market is currently the healthiest in retailing, and with the stock market booming, affluent customers are feeling particularly flush at the moment. Across the country, retailers are expecting a merry holiday shopping season after some rather dreary years.

The improved retail picture was in evidence earlier this week, when Bloomingdale’s parent, Federated Department Stores Inc., reported a strong earnings turnaround. The Cincinnati retailer, the nation’s biggest department store company, posted a profit of $41.8 million for the third quarter, compared with a loss of $46.4 million a year earlier. Sales declined 4%, to $3.61 billion, reflecting the closing of about 30 of the 82 Broadway stores it acquired a year ago.

And for the owner of Fashion Square Sherman Oaks, the opening of Bloomingdale’s is a welcome event after nearly three years of upheaval.

The mall suffered substantial damage in the 1994 Northridge earthquake, and it took months to make repairs. And for the past several months, Macy’s--formerly a Bullock’s--has been its only anchor while the former Broadway store was being refurbished in preparation for the arrival of Bloomingdale’s.

What’s more, last spring the mall was sold by its longtime owner, City Freeholds USA, to Prudential Assurance Co., a British insurer. The new owner undertook a $4-million renovation, adding more parking, new paint, landscaping, fountains and furnishings. It is now trying to attract more upscale mall shops, such as Restoration Hardware and Coach Leather.

Along with Bloomingdale’s, the changes will put Fashion Square “in a class by itself in the San Fernando Valley,” said Jack Ohringer, the shopping center’s vice president of leasing. He predicted Fashion Square’s sales would soon reach about $450 per square foot--placing it in the upper echelon of shopping centers nationwide.

But Bloomingdale’s conquest of Southern California--and the Valley--isn’t in the bag just yet.

Bloomingdale’s faces formidable competition from Saks Fifth Avenue, Neiman-Marcus and the king of customer service, Nordstrom. To win here, Bloomingdale’s must “execute at the highest level of its game,” said Poneman.

Bloomingdale’s must also be attuned to the need to tailor its East Coast sensibilities to a West Coast crowd. One good sign, analysts say, is that the retailer has established a regional buying office specifically for Southern California, so that decisions about what merchandise to carry will be made here.

Lindblad said Bloomingdale’s has done its homework on the California consumer and adjusted its fashion offerings to include, for example, “casual career business” clothes.

In Sherman Oaks on Thursday, workers were still putting cosmetic touches on Bloomingdale’s entrances. Inside, everything appeared ready, with clothes hanging neatly and holiday decorations in place.

As the sawing and drilling echoed through the mall, shoppers wandered by for a peek. Their collective enthusiasm was less than overwhelming.

“I won’t be here Saturday. I definitely won’t be here,” one woman muttered before turning abruptly away.

“How California,” remarked Anita Bloom, slightly curling her lip. The 62-year-old Studio City resident, who worked at the original Bloomingdale’s as a teenager, expected an appearance more consistent with the Manhattan landmark.

“It looks like every other mall store out here. I wish they had done more with wood. The New York store has this gorgeous wood.”

But Frank Valentine, who runs Roberts & Co. Fine Jewelers next door to Bloomingdale’s, can’t wait for Saturday.

“It’s been pretty bad, first with the earthquake and now with this construction,” he said. “I’m looking forward to the traffic. If people walk out of there, I’ve got ‘em.”

Yet, Lindblad and analysts agree that the real key to Bloomingdale’s success will be achieving that intangible something that makes a store distinctive and keeps shoppers coming back for more. “That’s not necessarily a scientific thing,” said Kalish of Price Waterhouse. “It’s a touchy-feely thing.”

Whether Bloomingdale’s will boost the local economy is also not clear. Jobs were lost with the closure of the Fashion Square’s Broadway; now they’re being replaced. If Bloomingdale’s does better than the old Broadway, it will generate more sales tax revenue.

And in retailing, success breeds success. Bloomingdale’s will likely act as a magnet for other tony shops and restaurants, which will all feed off one another’s traffic.

But analysts say that Bloomingdale’s arrival here is more the result of a healthy economy than a contributor to it.

“The issue is whether it’s a zero-sum game, whether somebody has to lose for Bloomingdale’s to win,” said Giss of Deloitte & Touche.

“I think it will be a little of both. I think they’ll take a little market share from the competitors. I also think they’ll make the whole pie a little bigger.”

Apodaca is a Times staff writer and Hayes is a correspondent.