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AVENUE ADDS FASHION TO PLUS-SIZE APPAREL

By Rodger Brown

“I’m not ‘fashionable.’ I’ll never be fashionable. But I’m always gonna look good.”

Katie Bolton, who was on her way into the Avenue store at Chatham Plaza, in Savannah, Ga., on a recent Saturday afternoon in January, might have phrased her take on plus-size shopping a little bluntly for corporate advertising purposes, but she was more or less on message with regard to the booming apparel and accessories market for full-size women.

“I know I have some extra ‘me’ on me,” said the 38-year-old, who works in the allied health field. “It’s just a relief when you can find a store that has nice clothes that fit well without squeezing me all up.”

Bolton and other full-figured gals have been taking heart over the past few years as an increasing number of retail chains and apparel brands have expanded into plus-size fashion. The growth of this dynamic has been astonishing.

According to Mintel International Group, a market research firm with offices in Chicago; London; and Sydney, Australia, more than half of all females over 18 bought plus-size clothes in 2005, creating a $32 billion market.

And this market is still growing. Mintel estimates that it could expand by 10 percent over the next five years. “The increased availability of fashion options has really impacted the plus-size category,” said Kat Fay, an analyst at Mintel, in a statement issued with the firm’s report on the state of petite and plus-size women’s apparel.

“For years, plus-size women had to shop from limited selections. They were also forced to shop from catalogues or online because many plus-sizes were not stocked in the stores. Easier access to purchasing clothing, coupled with more flattering styles and wider distribution, specifically through mass-merchandisers, plays a strong part in driving increased sales.”

United Retail Group is one of those merchandisers benefiting from the growth in the plus-size market. “I think what’s happened in the world is that plus-size people in general and women in particular are no longer satisfied just to take whatever clothing is made in their size,” said Aaron J. Fleishaker, United Retail’s senior vice president for real estate. “They want to feel beautiful, they want to have fashion, and it’s important. The world is not a size 6 Victoria’s Secret model. There are people in the world who are plus-size people, and there’s no reason they shouldn’t be able to walk into a beautiful store and have beautifully coordinated outfits and have beautiful lingerie, so that no matter what size they are, they can feel confident and sexy.” Over the past few years, United Retail’s Avenue stores have been building the concept aggressively, spending $17 million to renovate stores and implement new technologies to better position their brand. The approach is the women’s version of what Casual Male has done by rebranding its stores as Casual Male XL from the more stigmatized Casual Male Big & Tall.

“Over the past several years, United Retail has really been working with the concept to make sure they had the stores just right from a design standpoint and a merchandising standpoint,” Fleishaker said. “The company said, ‘Before we ramp up expansion, we have to make sure we have the concept just right.’ Now we think we have a fantastic concept. We have our own designers designing stores with beautiful clothes and outfits for the plus-size woman. We have a lot of proprietary fabrics, styles, designs. We have Avenue Body for lingerie [and] Cloudwalkers for shoes, and the customer has responded terrifically with sales. Now is the time we should ramp up our new store concept. Now is the time to start expanding again.”

The fact that United Retail is still in business to start its new push for expansion is a story in itself and testimony to the persistence of CEO Raphael Benaroya.

In the 1980s Benaroya was heading up the Lane Bryant brand for The Limited, a success story in apparel during that decade. Lane Bryant was founded at the turn of the century by Lena Himmelstein Bryant, a Lithuanian immigrant whose first name got transposed to “Lane” on the papers for her first bank account. Lane Bryant is the plus-size market’s oldest, most venerable brand. The Limited bought it in 1982 when that company was flush with cash from the success of its model of selling inexpensive clothes that mimicked the latest fashions.

Benaroya oversaw the Lane Bryant division when it launched Lerner Woman and Sizes Unlimited in the late 1980s. Benaroya, a retail apparel veteran with experience at Izod Lacoste and Jordache, orchestrated a spin-off that placed Lerner Woman and Sizes Unlimited under the new, United Retail Group umbrella. He also rebranded Lerner Woman as The Avenue and took the company public.

In 1991, on the eve of the IPO, Benaroya articulated the strategy that would become the mantra for plus-size businesses for the next 15 years or so. He told Chain Store Age Executive: “With 40 percent of the American women’s market in size 14 and up, we think The Avenue is a concept long overdue. Style and fashion is as important to a large-sized woman as it is to a smaller-sized one. The days when the large-sized shopper would settle for dowdy looking clothes and ugly stores are over.”

The 1990s began as a promising time for apparel and accessories companies. In 1992, 24 apparel companies went public, United Retail among them. Meanwhile, as Benaroya optimistically marketed his new concept, the likes of Dillard’s, Neiman Marcus and Saks began moving into plus-size lines and saturating the market. By 1993 United Retail’s stock had plunged nearly 45 percent.

Benaroya then moved to consolidate everything under one brand: Avenue (that official “The” got ditched somewhere along the way). He retooled the layout and ambience of the stores, in some cases adding marble floors and soft lighting, and he introduced new, branded lines.

Avenue’s merchandising strategy has also been designed to facilitate a can’t-go-wrong selection process for the plus-size customer who might not be as fashion-savvy as her more svelte sisters. “For the customer who might not be able to put everything together themselves, we’re able to provide them with complete outfits,” Fleishaker said. “They don’t have to reinvent the wheel. They can come into our store and see a mannequin with a blazer, a turtleneck and a pair of slacks, and they can buy all the pieces and walk out with a beautiful outfit. The lines are coordinated to make it much easier to mix and match.”

The strategy appears to have worked. In 2005, the latest year for which figures are available, the company’s Avenue stores saw a 10 percent year-on-year sales boost, to $438.7 million. Comparable-store sales rose 12 percent.

Today Avenue operates nearly 500 stores across 35 states. The company plans to launch between 30 and 50 additional stores this year, measuring about 5,000 square feet each.

“We’re looking mostly for open-air, strip shopping centers,” Fleishaker said. “Our key criteria is that we’re looking for pretty dense, key demographics. They have to have 150,000 people in the trade area with a good percentage of women in the 25-54 age range.

“We find our success strategy is really based on being in centers that drive a good deal of female traffic, so we like having other female-fashion-type co-tenants, like a T.J. Maxx, Ross Dress for Less or, if it’s a large enough center, a Target — sometimes even a good supermarket chain,” he said. “So we really like to be involved in centers that have a good co-tenancy to help drive traffic.”

Fleishaker says visibility is a major requirement as well. “We have to have a prime location within the center,” he said.

Currently, Avenue stores are concentrated in the Southeast and in the mid-Atlantic states, and the new stores are likely to be located there as well. “We want to focus on markets where we already have concentrations of stores,” Fleishaker said. “That way it doesn’t place stress on distribution and supervision.

Plus, for marketing, we already have good name recognition in those markets. So we’re going to focus on areas where we already have some penetration and try and grow those markets even bigger.”