After a decade-long search for the right location, Rodd & Gunn is about to make a move into Manhattan.
The New Zealand men’s brand has signed a lease at 125 Fifth Avenue in the Flatiron District for a flagship that is slated to open at the end of the month.
According to Newmark Retail, which negotiated the lease, Rodd & Gunn has secured a 4,056-square-foot space between 19th and 20th Streets. The brand will use the 2,156-square-foot ground floor as selling space and the 1,900-square-foot basement for inventory.
“This transaction marks the close of a multiyear process searching for the best opportunity for the tenant to transition in the Manhattan retail market,” said Michael Paster, Newmark’s senior managing director. “Through this patient approach we successfully identified a complementary fit at 125 Fifth Avenue for the brand’s flagship location.”
Reached at his office in Auckland, Michael Beagley, chief executive officer of Rodd & Gunn, said, “We’d been looking for a site in New York for 10 years and we finally got one.”
He stressed that the search lasted that long because he wanted to ensure that when he did sign on the dotted line, the location he selected had the best chance to be profitable. “We never open stores for ego,” he said. “They need to make money and build brand awareness.”
That location should fit the bill. The Rodd & Gunn store will have 21 feet of frontage on Fifth Avenue and is located near Abercrombie & Fitch, Club Monaco, Rhone, Sephora, Ganni, Aritzia, New Balance and Tumi, among others.
When the Flatiron store opens, it will be only the 12th unit in the U.S. Rodd & Gunn has 240 stores and concessions around the world and its sales have doubled in the past two years, according to Beagley, who said the last year has “been one of the best I’ve had in my 45 years of retailing. We have a great business in Canada, we’ve expanded into the U.K., opened in Singapore and will be adding another four countries in the next six to nine months.
“We’re becoming more international,” he said. “The product acceptance is strong and there’s a lot of commonality in all the markets, which makes it easier.”
Despite the rapid growth, the company is, and will remain, privately owned, he said, and has funded its growth internally.
Rodd & Gunn opened its first U.S. store in the Dumbo neighborhood in Brooklyn in 2011 and now operates units in Santa Clara, Calif.; Greenwich, Conn.; suburban Chicago; Dallas; McLean, Va., and Bellevue, Wash., among others.
But Beagley said since entering the U.S. market around 12 years ago, Rodd & Gunn has been focusing primarily on wholesale. The brand is carried in Nordstrom and Bloomingdale’s, as well as a large number of independent specialty stores.
Although Australia remains its largest market, the U.S. is number two and Beagley expects it to be larger within the next few years. “The U.S. is rapidly catching up,” he said. “It’s taken a lot longer than I thought it would, but we’re doing it in the right way — strategically.”
Rodd & Gunn was established in 1987 and opened its first store on Queen Street in Auckland, New Zealand, that same year.
Rodd & Gunn’s heritage dates to 1946, when the brand’s English Pointer logo was used on a line of New Zealand-made shirts. It has since created a full lifestyle collection of apparel and footwear. The company opened its first store in Toronto last month.
For the Flatiron store, Paster served as the tenant representative, while Newmark’s vice chairman Ariel Schuster and associate director Tyler King represented Rumpf, the landlord at 125 Fifth Avenue. That space was once the home of the first Intermix location and the building has undergone an extensive renovation after it was acquired by Rumpf in 2011.
