Diane von Furstenberg is going after bricks and clicks.
The designer, who is known for her level of engagement and attention to detail, signs off on every location, from downtown Manhattan to Dubai.
The $500 million company has an aggressive growth plan to operate 100 stores in the U.S. in the next five to six years, open more international stores and roll out a new prototype that puts accessories in the spotlight.
Joel Horowitz, who joined DVF in 2012, said he took one look at the company and determined its biggest growth opportunity was in retail.
“When I first sat down with the family to present a plan as to how I envisioned growing the business, retail was the major focus,” Horowitz said. “The plan showed that we could comfortably open 100 stores in the U.S. in a five-to-six-year period. From there, we’d grow the business based on the results of those 100 stores.”
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Horowitz said 200 U.S. stores “is not a crazy number when you look at our price points and market segment and how many stores our competitors have. Our focus as a company has been on New York, Florida, California and Texas. We’re looking and have opened stores in secondary markets such as Seattle and Scottsdale [Ariz.]. We’ll be opening a store in Atlanta soon.”
Von Furstenberg still doesn’t have a full-price store in Chicago. “Eventually we’ll open a store in Chicago and all the major cities, based on getting the right locations with the right economics,” Horowitz said.
DVF’s Meatpacking flagship will undergo renovation in January that will set the tone for the entire fleet. The store will have new fixturing and a café.
“It’s going to be the home of DVF,” Horowitz said. The most important change, however, will be the layout and the amount of space devoted to accessories. Ready-to-wear will move to the back of the store and accessories will be front and center.
“The way we’re laying out our retail stores is we’re overinvesting on the accessories side,” Horowitz said. “We know that to have a successful retail rollout that’s profitable, accessories has to make up a significant percentage of total sales.”
A measure of the importance of accessories is the fact that 40 to 50 percent of the store will be given over to the category.
“As of now, sales are nowhere near that percentage,” Horowitz reported. “Our goal is to get accessories to be 50 percent of sales. It will take three to four years to get there. Today, the classification accounts for a little over 10 percent of sales.”
There’s another activity in New York, where von Furstenberg is set to open a store at Brookfield Place in lower Manhattan.
“We looked at both projects,” Horowitz said, referring to the World Trade Center, “and felt that the ready-to-wear consumer, which is the great majority of our business, would shop more in the Brookfield environment. The World Trade Center is going to be more of an impulse-buy consumer. Brookfield Place is more of a local TriBeCa consumer as well as tourists.”
There are other opportunities in New York. “Certainly Madison Avenue, the Upper East Side, Upper West Side and the Flatiron District,” Horowitz said. “We could have five, six or seven stores in Manhattan alone. Then there’s Brooklyn.”
With stores in 20 countries beyond the U.S. — Brazil, Belgium, China, France, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, Kuwait, Malaysia, Macau, Singapore, South Korea, Sweden, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and the U.K. — the company’s biggest global growth is in China. The designer has 47 stores in Asia, including 15 units in China. Four additional stores are set to open in China by the end of the year.
“We’re well represented in Asia, in Japan, Korea, China and all of Southeast Asia,” Horowitz said. “In the next four years, we’ll have as many as 40 stores in China.”
Eight stores will open in Korea this year and eight to 10 are planned for next year. Japan has 12 locations; there are two each in Taiwan and Singapore; four in Hong Kong, with a fifth set to bow in Harbour City.
“I see growth throughout all of Southeast Asia,” Horowitz said. “In Macau, we have two stores and we’re bursting at the seams. We’ll open a third store next year.”
DVF stores are partnerships or joint ventures in most of the world, including the Middle East, where the company has units in Abu Dhabi and Dubai and continues to look at different opportunities.
France is the only country where DVF operates company-owned stores; two are in Paris and one is in Saint-Tropez.
“We have a partnership in the U.K. with Tom Chapman for four stores in Mayfair, Notting Hill and Wimbledon in London and an outlet at Bicester Village in Bicester. We see a lot of growth opportunity in the U.K., as well as throughout the Continent,” Horowitz said. “The focus for our own resources is for U.S. growth. Once we dominate in the U.S., we’ll move on to other territories using our own capital.”
Beyond physical locations, however, e-commerce is DVF’s single biggest door.
“When I got to the company, e-commerce was independent of retail so it had a separate buying team and was run separately,” Horowitz said. “There wasn’t a strong consistency for what e-commerce showed on the Web site versus the customer experience in the stores. We want to make that experience as seamless as possible. Now, all buying is centralized under one umbrella.”
The Web site recently got a face-lift. “We just updated the home page and the World of DVF,” which includes news and blogs from style editor Jessica Joffe and DVF herself. There are also updates on the Wrap 40 initiative, the 40th-anniversary celebration of the wrap dress, which is being sent around the world and worn by “It” girls.
“We’re going to continue to upgrade the content,” said Eran Cohen, chief marketing officer. “We’re starting Diane’s Diary, so Diane will be writing weekly or biweekly. The World of DVF is really everything that surrounds us and the brand.
“Diane is really happy with where we’re going,” Cohen said. “She is involved with everything that happens in this company — mobile, social, product marketing, retail, sales associates and windows. Her vision and eye and attention are here.”
The company will continue to update other pieces of the Web site.
“We’re going to redesign the checkout pages and customer-service pages. We think the redesign reflects the brand. It’s not too complex. We feel like the message is clear.”
DVF operates four Web sites globally from a single platform for the U.S., U.K., Europe and a world site. “The sites work for different country currencies and markup structures,” Cohen said. “We’re sensitive to our international partners. Today, the bulk of our online business is done in North America.”
Cohen added that DVF’s customers are citizens of the world. “Our global consumer isn’t limited by geography. A lot of our customers in Europe are Asian and a large percentage of our customers in New York are Brazilian. We don’t think about the country they come from, but as a group of consumers, we think about what they like.”
The company is always looking at new technology, he noted: “We’re deciding what we’ll test and what we’ll engage with. Diane loves technology. A lot of people come knocking on our doors because Diane is a known innovator and is known to take risks and try something new. That makes it exciting for us.”