Carolina Herrera to Expand Retail Footprint With New Palm Beach Store
Carolina Herrera looks to make a splash in Palm Beach.
In a significant move to expand its retail footprint, the New York-based Carolina Herrera will open a Palm Beach, Florida, location in the fourth quarter. The store, which will open with the resort ’24 collection, is located at 150 Worth Avenue in the Esplanade complex of stores.
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“This boutique marks an important step in our growth strategy reinforcing our ambition to bring the Carolina Herrera brand experience more locally to our known and future consumer, and to complement our current distribution points,” said Emilie Rubinfeld, president of Carolina Herrera New York. “Palm Beach is a proven market for our brand, and now we have the opportunity to host and immerse our clients in an environment that reflects the essence of the house and the vision of our creative director — while sharing the complete range of our portfolio of products from daywear, high-evening, beauty and accessories in a luxurious space.”
The Palm Beach store joins a broad global retail network for the Puig-owned Herrera brand, which includes two wholly owned and operated Carolina Herrera fashion boutiques on Madison Avenue in New York and Highland Park Village in Dallas, one newly opened beauty store in Nanjing, China, and more than 320 license-operated CH Carolina Herrera stores which feature women’s, men’s, children’s and accessories-focused lifestyle collections.
In discussing where else they’d like to open more Herrera fashion boutiques, Rubinfeld said, “This is the first phase of our retail rollout. There’s more to come on where we’re going. The ambition is that we pop up in locations in the proven key markets,” she said. She said the company is looking at expanding its footprint in Florida, Texas and California.
The new Herrera outpost will be a 2,200-square-foot corner location that will house the brand’s luxury women’s ready-to-wear collection, as well as beauty and accessories including handbags, shoes and jewelry. The store’s design reflects creative director Wes Gordon’s vision first expressed with the renovation of the flagship on Madison Avenue, which was unveiled in August 2019.
The Palm Beach store design will feature the brand’s signature black-and-white limestone hexagonal floor, inspired by the Roman apartment of artist Cy Twombly. Featuring an open-format floor plan, the store is filled with natural light, has blush venetian plaster walls, and rounded shapes and curved edges on details ranging from seating to fixtures and wall transitions — reinforced by columns finished in a textured limestone.
The design has spaces to display women’s ready-to-wear and high-evening styles with a focal feature wall in whitewashed oak to highlight the brand’s handbag collection.
Two fitting room pods, lined in ivory twill fabric, anchor the floor plan.
“In designing the Palm Beach store, I was thinking of it as the courtyard extension of our Madison Avenue mansion, to marry iconic design elements from our flagship with the natural elements that make Palm Beach so unique,” said Gordon, who assumed his role in 2018. “The world of Herrera has always felt innately in harmony with Palm Beach to me, so adapting existing design elements to the space was a very organic process. It was important to me that the same level of detail and attention is applied to our store environments, the same way we design and perfect our collections. The picture I kept envisioning for Palm Beach was the Herrera woman dancing barefoot in a ballgown — I wanted to translate that sense of relaxed elegance to the space.”
Other design elements include dramatic archways framing dark brushed bronze hanging rails, the signature Herrera-Red facade detail with scalloped panels, and a makeup and fragrance corner. Lighter touches which harmonize with the more neutral environment include champagne brass and cerused whitewashed oak, combined with natural caning and rattan. Soft seating with custom upholstery and lighting, marble furniture pieces and rug-work with twisted rope details reflect the proximity to the oceanside landscape.
The project design and development was done in partnership with architect Mao Hughes and interior designer David Lucido.
Rubinfeld said that Florida is a key market for Herrera, along with New York, Texas and California. The Palm Beach unit represents the first time Herrera has had a freestanding store in the city. Herrera’s key distribution partners in Florida are Neiman Marcus and Saks Fifth Avenue, along with some smaller specialty stores. The brand had a store in Bal Harbour, Florida, years ago, but currently Palm Beach will be its only freestanding store in the state.
“When you go to Palm Beach, and are just walking down the street, you see a lot of women already dressed in Herrera,” said Rubinfeld. “Palm Beach has historically been a very strong market for Carolina Herrera, as has been all of Florida. Following the pandemic, our business overall enjoyed momentum globally beyond 2019 levels. That said, Florida, Texas and the Sun Belt overall have shown significant strength. I think the fact that we stand for joy, femininity and optimism, and our dresses and collections embody those qualities have made our brand resonate more than ever,” she said.
What’s important about this store is it’s coming out of the transition from “Mrs. Herrera, the founder, to Wes in the new era of Herrera,” she said.
“The new store represents a very 360 vision for the brand. We did a renovation in 2019 of our Madison Avenue flagship store. This is the first outpost, outside of New York, that represents the new era of Herrera. We’re really about excited about bringing the full Carolina Herrera experience more locally to where we have known clients, and where we know we have a high affinity for the brand,” she said.
In its corner location, Rubinfeld said the store is located next door to Emilio Pucci and near Saks. “It’s a great complex of stores. It has a lot of local charm, and it will be a great Herrera destination. We really see it as an opportunity for us to do events and do special projects and highlight new collections, so we’re very excited about having a physical space there,” she said.
As for what she hopes the new Palm Beach store will say about the brand and the collection, Rubinfeld said, “Our goal with this store is that it showcases the collection in a way that conveys the essence of the brand. What are the codes of Carolina Herrera today that are consistent with the codes that are in the collection? There’s this spirit in the clothes that’s joyful and colorful and conveys optimism, and the store is really the backdrop for that expression for the brand. Our goal is that when a woman walks into the boutique to experience the clothes, she connects the clothes to the environment. We’ve done our job if she keeps coming back and she loves how she feels not only in the clothes, but in our spaces,” said Rubinfeld.
The store will offer Palm Beach customers access to the full collection, custom orders, pre-access to the collections, exclusives, and alteration services. It will also offer custom bridal and high-evening.
“That’s available in all of our stores. It’s a great experience. There’s an opportunity to work with Wes and our design team, and just getting that custom experience when you want something no one else in the world has. To be able to offer that in our stores is quite unique, particularly for an American fashion house to be able to provide that level of couture and customization,” she said. Like he does in New York and Dallas, Gordon will be supporting the store with appearances and tie-ins with local charities, she said.
Whether having a freestanding store in Palm Beach will impact Herrera’s business at Neiman’s or Saks, Rubinfeld said, “It brings attention to the brand. It’s our job to support our department store businesses in all the markets we’re in, whether they share the market with a retail store. Our approach to Palm Beach is very much aligned to what we do in New York.”
Rubinfeld called current business “great,” and said the company ended the first half with double-digit increases compared to last year and “triple digit for digital sales, which for a brand like Carolina Herrera is quite exciting given our price point.”
She attributed it to very strong collections in the pipeline, and that the company turned a corner on shipping and is out of the supply chain disruption. “We’ve had really good shipping and great newness that we’re featuring online. That, along with incredibly strong collections and having the right product drop at the right time,” she said.
As reported, Herrera showed its resort ’24 collection in Rio de Janeiro on June 1. Although it was a rain-soaked night, it didn’t dampen the spirt of Gordon’s buoyant collection, WWD reported. The first resort runway show was a significant milestone for the American fashion house, which joined luxury powerhouses Louis Vuitton, Chanel and Dior on the destination show map.
Asked what she anticipates will be bestsellers in the Palm Beach store, Rubinfeld didn’t hesitate.
“I think it will be the power of the dress. That’s what we do well. Providing dresses that make women feel their most beautiful and confident. I anticipate that the dresses that we continue to offer in the collections will really resonate,” she said.
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