PRINT THIS STORY:

CHANGE TEXT SIZE:

TRENDY LOUNGE SEEKS HIP, RICH URBAN SHOPPER

By Jesse Serwer

New York City’s SoHo district is lined with trendy boutiques that sell nightclub-ready attire while house music blares in the background. But no SoHo shop makes the connection between fashion and nightlife more explicit than Lounge, a 16,000-square-foot, two-level, destination store downtown on Broadway.

Besides pricey, fashion-forward apparel from the likes of Heatherette, Miss Sixty and True Religion, and shoes, accessories and carefully chosen vintage wear, Lounge sells music CDs and Hollywood memorabilia like a $1,740 framed poster from the movie Pulp Fiction, signed by Quentin Tarantino, Uma Thurman and John Travolta. A full-time DJ oversees a booming sound system.

“We’re not a clothing store, we’re a lifestyle emporium,” said Jack Menashe, Lounge’s owner. “People are buying music to go with the outfit they just bought.”

Other Lounge features include the Casablanca Tea Room, a bar and restaurant that has catered to celebrities like Paula Abdul (she once spent seven hours at Lounge during a well-publicized $10,000 shopping spree), and a hair salon.

“It’s all very visually stimulating,” said Tim Buss, a fashion retail consultant at the New York City-based Doneger Group. “There’s so much going on and it’s so loud — your eyes are constantly darting around to see something new. And there’s a glitz to it all. It definitely appeals to the embellished, embroidered-jeans-and-cowboy-boots crowd and also a very moneyed crowd as well.”

It is perhaps unsurprising that Menashe, who ran menswear chain Bang Bang in New York City with his father, picked Las Vegas as the first place to expand beyond New York, given Las Vegas’ emphasis on entertainment. Having perused Sin City for two years, Lounge signed on a few months ago as anchor tenant at developer Ian Bruce Eichner’s $3 billion Cosmopolitan Resort & Casino. The store will open in 2009. Cosmopolitan’s 265,000-square-foot mall is a key component of the 6.9 million-square-foot project, which seeks to live up to its name by appealing to the young, hip and rich.

“The idea is to build a ‘street’ inside of a Vegas resort and merchandise it with the sort of tenants you would find in SoHo or on Robertson Avenue in Los Angeles,” said Frank Volk, executive vice president of Robert K. Futterman & Associates and Cosmopolitan’s retail leasing agent. “The tenant type we’re chasing is the boutique street retailer that appeals to the fashionista. Having an edgy concept like Lounge signed on this early helps us to create that feel.”

The New York store made a splash when it rolled out in 2003, what with its live singers, body painters and other entertainers that caught the eye of passersby. It soon built a base of customers willing to pay for designer items. “I noticed no one in New York City was serving the high-end hipster customer,” Menashe said.

An important part of the Lounge strategy is menswear, which Menashe, who has been buying men’s apparel professionally since he was 17, picks himself. Even though women customers often outnumber men, menswear accounts for over 50 percent of Lounge’s sales volume. (Menashe declines to divulge figures.)

“There are very few strong menswear concepts,” said Menashe. “You’ve got the traditional high-end menswear retailers that are, in my opinion, very boring, and the same high-end brands in all of the stores. We try to give menswear much more of a fashion-forward twist.”

That means, in many cases, T-shirts, jeans and blazers with embroidered designs and logos.

“Men are dressing younger these days, so that opens up the concept to a lot of different age groups. You could say [Lounge] is gearing towards 20- and 30-somethings, but you also have the 17-year-old kid who thinks it’s cool to have something exclusive in there. Then you’re going to have a guy who’s 60 and wants to look younger.”

Menashe estimates he will invest between $3 million and $5 million in the Las Vegas store. Its designer is James Mansour, founder and president of Mansour Design, which also designed the SoHo store.

“The Las Vegas store is going to be its own animal, not a cookie-cutter copy of the New York store,” Menashe said. “I’m not sure how, just yet, but I can tell you that it will definitely be outrageous.”

As Menashe figures out how to up the ante amidst the glitz and glamour of the Las Vegas Strip, he is also angling for locations in other major cities. “The goal is to have 10 stores open within the next four years,” he said. “Miami and L.A. would obviously be two of the cities, along with another store in New York. San Francisco, Chicago and Phoenix are also interesting markets. But first we are going to look for some seed money from a good fund that will stand behind us, so we can expand the right way.”

Menashe says Lounge stores in the midterm will measure about 10,000 square feet (the size of the Las Vegas store), though future stores could measure over 20,000 square feet. He is scouting heavily populated, downtown areas that draw a wide range of shoppers.

“We would go into an enclosed mall if it was right, as long as it is in the heart of the city and near mass transportation,” he said. Lounge could do well in any major city’s “cool shopping corridor,” says Buss. “Obviously, being around affluent customers is important with the price points [Lounge] has.”