Fashion: Boyds Meets Girl
As Kent Gushner tells it, restaurateur Perrier was one arm into a new sport coat on the third floor when Kent leaned over and whispered into his brother-in-law Ralph’s ear: “Why don’t you go over there and see if he’d like to take over the café?” Bringing in Yurman necklaces and Cartier watches was another easy score. “Kenny” (Kent Gushner) found a ready partner in “Danny” (Daniel Govberg), his friend since sixth grade on the Main Line. They’d even worked together before, running a pool chemical business when they were both 15. Which is all very nice and expedient, but how about a little research into what women want in a shopping experience? How about a couple of focus groups to find out, as their highly successful neighbor, women’s clothier Anthropologie, does, how the ladies like to move around the store, how long they plan to spend on each retail moment, and where they’re traveling to when they run out the door? “I don’t think we need research,” says Gushner. “We have a good feel for the audience we will appeal to.” Yaffe is equally confident: “I don’t know women’s as well as men’s, but I do know one thing. I know we are great luxury retailers … so selling another product — women’s clothing, watches, great food, or anything else that’s high-end — we’re good at doing it.”
Play with the big boys.
“Ready for the big move?” Dan Barteluce, of Barteluce Architects & Associates in New York City, asked a Boyds salesman as we walked through the men’s shoe salon, which would soon be relocating to a larger but less visible space on the fourth level to make room for Perrier’s café. In the silence that followed, you could have slipped on a pair of Gucci loafers and gotten at least halfway around the Oriental rug. “No,” the guy finally managed to spit out.
The owners, anyway, are excited about having Barteluce spearhead their renovation, especially since he’s given a recent face-lift to the women’s shoe and accessory departments at Bergdorf Goodman, the tony Manhattan department store with cutting-edge designers and an old-world feel that seems to serve as the new Boyds’ unspoken aspiration. Unspoken, that is, by them. While the owners are careful to point out that at 60,000 square feet, they’re more a very large specialty store than a department store, Barteluce sees a fairly direct comparison. “They saw Bergdorf and were very inspired by what we did there,” he says.
“If Boyds can be as successful as New York’s Bergdorf’s, a lot more national companies will take notice. They will decide Philadelphia is worth coming back to,” says Govberg, 44, the store’s new jeweler, referencing Boyds’ legendary ad tagline, “Come back to Philadelphia. Come to Boyds.” Even outsiders think the store’s future could involve moving closer to the fuller-scale luxury department-store model. “Boyds will do very well because we don’t have a department store that’s catered to women who love nice things and want to do one-stop shopping and spend money all in one store, like a Bergdorf Goodman,” says Tuesday Gordon, a longtime employee at Joan Shepp, on Walnut Street.
