Khloé Kardashian’s Good American Advances Its Retail Agenda

Good American, the denim-centric brand cofounded by Khloé Kardashian and Emma Grede, has revved up its retail agenda with additional freestanding stores and shops-in-shop in the works.

The brand also has a new store design created in association with the global architecture and design firm MG2.

MG2 began developing the innovative concept initially with a shop-in-shop opened in October at Selfridges in London, and subsequently finessed the format for the freestanding store opened last week in Atlanta, the brand’s first store in the city. The 2,757-square-foot unit, with just under 2,000 square feet of selling space, is located in the Lenox Square shopping center.

Another store will open early in the summer in the Westfield Topanga center in Canoga Park, Calif. Good American operates three other stores, in Caesars Forum in Las Vegas, at the Century City mall in Los Angeles, and in the Fashion Island shopping center in Newport Beach, Calif.

“We’ve got a lot of projects planned for this year and next year,” Bree Richmond, Good American’s vice president of retail, told WWD.

Beyond Topanga, Richmond said, “I’m not ready to share any specific locations yet, but more retail is coming and we’re really excited about our next wave of growth.”

“There are some things that you’ll see in every shop we have, such as our iconic blue denim wall, and there’s a similar flow,” Richmond said. “And in Atlanta, there’s that same thread but we created a different design. We’ve added new fixtures, rugs, new mannequins, woods with different textures. We’ve added warmth to the environment, but it still feels like Good American. MG2’s design is a big evolution from where we were. The space feels very sophisticated and luxurious, but it still makes sense for our contemporary price point.”

“The Atlanta store is an articulation of the brand’s attention to detail,” said Melissa Gonzalez, principal of MG2.

She said the new store design is better suited to accommodate Good American’s growth into additional categories, such as belts, which were introduced last year.

Other features of the new retail design include:

“We created custom molds for mannequins, because we could not find in the market any representations of the bodies that we wanted,” Richmond said. “So we created four custom bodies specifically for our fits and our sizes, and there are also four custom skin tones.”

Good American is well-known for its inclusive, expansive denim assortment, which factored into the new store design in a major way. “We have an incredible amount of denim selection in our stores,” said Richmond. “We loved the challenge of figuring out how do we carry our entire size range in the store. It’s a small footprint, but from a merchandising strategy, there’s a breadth of size options. So it’s no easy feat to present it in a way that it’s accessible to customers of all sizes.”

Fifty percent of the Good American collection is denim; 47 percent is ready-to-wear, which includes tops, bottoms, dresses, jackets and outerwear, and 3 percent is belts. In denim, there’s a total of about 100 styles, fits and washes. The collection overall offers casual, work and fashion-forward looks for teenage and adult women. All the clothes are designed in-house in Los Angeles.

“We’re starting to see the shift into a wider-leg denim as opposed to skinny,” Richmond said. “The market has really moved from skinny into a more relaxed or wider leg. We have a jean called the Good Ease that has been really strong for us.”

Bestsellers includes Good American’s “Soft Tech” supersoft denim that holds its shape.

Given the complexity of the denim offering, Good American recently piloted a four-day training program in Atlanta, the “Denim University,” to ensure store associates were equipped with product knowledge to best serve customers.

In denim, sizes run from double zero to 32. In rtw, sizes range from extra small to 5XL. “The ability to serve everyone has always been part of our brand DNA. You will always find the full size range in our retail locations,” Richmond said.

While denim is ubiquitous across the retail landscape, Richmond believes there’s room to succeed. “It’s a competitive market, but I wouldn’t say it’s saturated. We stay super focused on the denim that we do, which is the full-size range. We really make sure that we create styles that work beautifully on all body types. That’s the denim space we live in. We obsess over every detail with the denim, and we really hold our brand promise true, that we create denim for everybody. All women should feel confident, and we want to make sure we have a jean or ready-to-wear that makes her feel that way.”

In yet another brick-and-mortar maneuver, Good American in mid-March launched inside 36 Macy’s doors, and the brand’s presence at Macy’s will grow to a total of 79 doors in the fall. At Macy’s Herald Square flagship in Manhattan, there’s a 450-square-foot Good American shop on the contemporary floor. Aside from Macy’s, the eight-year-old brand has concessions and wholesale accounts around the world, at retailers including Bloomingdale’s and Selfridges.

“Partnering with Macy’s is an exciting milestone for Good American and a key component of the brand’s overall retail expansion strategy,” said Emma Grede, cofounder and chief executive officer of Good American, in a statement. “Launching in Macy’s reinforces our commitment to meeting our customers where they are at, considering we are seeing more and more customers wanting to shop in person in stores.”

“Emma Grede and her brand empower women to feel confident in their own skin while continually pushing the boundaries to innovate in the denim category and drive the industry to be more inclusive,” said Nata Dvir, chief merchandising officer for Macy’s, noting that Good American complements Macy’s selection of premium fashion brands.