« Field's Watch: Name stays for now, Lord & Taylor safe | Main | Field's Watch: Chicago moving to protect State Street building »
August 24, 2005
Forth & Towne opening August 31
Source: Chicago Sun-TimesChicago women can soon size up Gap's Forth & Towne
August 24, 2005
BY SANDRA GUY, Business ReporterChicago shoppers will be among the first to experience Gap's new Forth & Towne stores, aimed at women ages 35 and older.
Four of the retailer's five Forth & Towne stores nationwide will open Aug. 31 at Chicago area shopping malls. The fifth, at the Palisades Center in West Nyack, N.Y., opens today. The stores range in size from 8,000 to 10,000 square feet.
Gap also operates Old Navy and Banana Republic stores, as well as its namesake Gap stores.
Forth & Towne -- the name is meant to evoke a meeting place -- aims to lure baby boomer women from department stores and specialty stores such as Ann Taylor, Talbots and Chico's.
Gap has a ways to go, since it has a 3 percent market share among women older than 35. The target audience makes retailers salivate because it's the second-largest spending group behind teenagers, accounting for $66 billion in yearly spending on clothing.
A focal point of the Forth & Towne stores is the dressing room. A dozen spacious dressing rooms outfitted with adjustable lighting, three-way mirrors and experienced sales people nearby serve as the centerpiece of the stores. Each dressing room is decorated differently, and there's room for a husband, daughter or friend to sit inside.
Customers inside the dressing rooms can have a salesperson bring them clothes, and they may give their purchases to a salesperson to ring up while they get dressed.
"No one has made the dressing room a pleasurable experience or treated these shoppers with respect," said Forth & Towne President Gary Muto. "Our concept was very much inspired by the romanticism of 1940s and 1950s-era department stores, when shopping was an event."
Another effort to win fans is the use of a size 10 as a starting point to model how Forth & Towne's clothes fit. The traditional model is a size 8, but 70 percent of baby boomer women wear a size larger than 12, according to Forth & Towne executives.
Forth & Towne stores will sell clothes in women's and missy's sizes 2 through 20, compared with Gap's other chains that carry sizes 0 to 16.
Forth & Towne's target customers "are savvy women who know what they want," said Austyn Zung, the company's senior vice president of product design and development, at a press conference Tuesday at the New York store.
"These women are stylish, grownup and elegant. Their challenge is that they are not finding what they need in the marketplace today," said Zung, who joined Forth & Towne last year from Oscar de la Renta.
Another selling point is price. Most items sell for less than $100. Dress pants range in price from $88 to $108; blazers, $128 to $148; and outerwear, $88 to $168.
Customers who sign up for a loyalty program and who spend $500 receive free alterations and 5 percent off future purchases.
Four styles and brands of outfits, ranging from jeans to business clothes to dress-up, will be featured in boutiques to make the selections easier to shop. Shoppers are encouraged to assemble entire outfits in each style.
The stores also will highlight jewelry, shoes and handbags, and will let shoppers mix and match the accessories when they try on clothes.
The stores' layouts resulted from interviews, shop-alongs and closet inspections with likely shoppers within the past 18 months.
Gap chose Chicago as the first mass market for Forth & Towne because it's a profitable market for Gap's brands, and it has plenty of baby boomer women, ethnic and racial diversity and popular urban and suburban shopping centers, Muto said.
Forth & Towne stores will be located at Westfield Old Orchard shopping center in Skokie, Woodfield Mall in Schaumburg, Fox Valley Center in Aurora and at Algonquin Commons, an outdoor mall that includes Circuit City and OfficeMax as well as specialty apparel stores.
Gap plans to open five more Forth & Towne stores in 2006, and 30 in 2007. The locations have yet to be disclosed.
Tim Calkins, a professor of marketing at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management, said local demographics are certain to be "spot-on" with the ones Gap wants because the company is investing a great deal in the roll-out.
"It's not like they went into Denver or Kansas City, which would be much less expensive," Calkins said.
Gap is launching the Forth & Towne name to appeal to a new set of shoppers, and to preserve its three other brands, Calkins said.
"Gap's big challenge is to make the new brand very distinct from its other stores," Calkins said.
"Otherwise, Gap could end up with a portfolio that's too redundant and too complicated," he said.
Gap needs a winner. Sales at its stores open at least a year fell 3 percent in the second quarter, which ended July 30, and it lowered its yearly profit forecast last week.
The San Francisco-based retailer, which had $16.3 billion in revenue in 2004, might even be plumping itself up for a suitor, according to a report by analyst Robert F. Buchanan at A.G. Edwards.
He wrote: "There's a chance that an outside buyer might actually emerge for the Gap," especially when private equity firms are looking to invest their hefty cash reserves in underperforming companies with growth prospects.
Posted by Tannerman at August 24, 2005 08:54 AM | Categories: Old Orchard | Other Malls | The Promenade