Bal Harbour Shops ACCESS Suite Pop-Up
Part 1 of 4 - The Start-Up
Conceiving, building, and implementing the first mobile, multi-brand, luxury Pop-Up.
BCO started its work for Bal Harbour Shops in late 2019.
In early 2021 we launched the Bal Harbour Shops (BHS) Marketplace on the main site at balharbourshops.com. By no means was it a radical creation. There were lots of marketplaces in the world and some pretty amazing ones in existence like NetaPorter and Farfetch (rest in peace).
The site was launched to create greater stickiness with the customers who visited the BHS website. We had research that confirmed our belief that the website was a step in the purchase journey of many of “the Shops” customers. As a result, to increase the value of the site, for them, we decided to start putting products on it to simplify the journey for them.
We launched with 15 brands and today are at 31. By contrast, Amazon announced in 2012 they were doing a luxury marketplace. They launched in 2021 (nearly the same time) with only 8 brands. It’s a testament to the power of a single shopping center’s relationship with leading brands…and possibly a statement on the perceived impact of brand dilution based on association (Amazon presents itself as a competitor to Walmart).
Within three months of launching the site, we noticed that we were over-indexing for traffic (disproportionately more when compared to smaller markets) in B, C & D markets. Initially, we had thought that the site would get most of its traffic from places like New York, LA, Chicago, Atlanta, and Southern Florida: known luxury markets.
Instead, we were getting traffic from Omaha, Oklahoma City, Nashville, Raleigh, Mobile etc.
As everyone should know (and Farfetch proved) luxury is a 1:1 human interaction process. The selling ceremony of each luxury brand is uniquely geared towards a direct, physical interaction. Somehow a chat box doesn’t give consumers that warm fuzzy they seek when walking into Chanel or Prada.
Thus, our challenge was how to engage with these consumers in the manner they desired. It was fairly obvious to us that in those markets there was little or no luxury supply in the market so they were forced to either go to a market with luxury (like Miami) or buy it online. Since we had more than 95 luxury brands, our website was a great starting place.
Early on we thought the solution was a multi-brand pop-up. It would allow us to interact on a 1:1 basis with consumers and we knew that the brands liked to do pop-ups.
However, the biggest challenge was going to be how we aligned the pop-up with our understanding of how consumers perceived our brand. BHS is a highly regarded brand whose fundamental brand attribute is a single, iconic piece of property. As a result, we couldn’t take 5,000 square feet in a midwestern mall and have it resonate.
We needed a new take and one that consumers would visit and have a first reaction of “wow” and a follow-up, for those that had been there, ‘it is just like The Shops”. Frankly, it was a tall order.
I was assigned to work with the head of Architecture and Construction at BHS. We were sitting in an ideation session when I said: “about 10 years ago Puma, as part of their sponsorship of an around-the-world sailboat race, did a cool pop-up using shipping containers.”
He looked at me and said: “I remember that. It was done by an architectural firm called Lot-Ek, out of New York City. I’ve been following them, as a fan, for quite a while.”
We thought about it for a while and decided we should reach out to them…and we did.
Two days later I got a response from Giuseppe Lignano, one of the co-founders. We had a quick call and decided there may be some merit to the idea.
Three weeks later we started building the creative brief.
We spent a good deal of time on it because this single document is the point at which any creative enterprise is made or destroyed. Far too many ad agencies treat it as an order ticket. It should be a manifesto on how this single, execution is going to become a part of the lifeblood and DNA of a brand. It’s about how you integrate and execute details.
What we ended up on as the overarching expectation was this:
We believe that luxury, haute couture is one of the most critical aspects of modern art today. It allows artists and consumers to express themselves and align with a perspective of the world that is unique. It is aspirational in every sense of the world. We want the pop-up to completely represent the essence of Bal Harbour Shops while allowing the luxury brands' products to be presented as if in a museum; thus highlighting the artistic aspects of both the Shops and the Brands.
It was a significant hurdle to overcome with steel boxes.
A month later the Lot-Ek team returned with renderings that blew us away.
…like a herd of turtles. All of us knew this was going to be a challenging process. It would take heaps of capital, an ability to pull brands into the mix, and a significant shift in how the company operated.
The first and biggest challenge was communicating the reason why we were doing the pop-up. Yes, we had a brilliantly creative CEO. For several generations his family has worked, detail by detail, to create one of the most unique luxury experiences in the world. That takes significant vision, resilience, and discipline.
However, getting everyone else in the company to buy into it takes a while. I once read that it takes a person hearing about a change 13 times before it begins to resonate with them…and even then some will never get it. So, we began briefing everyone, meeting by meeting. It was arduous but critical.
For 60 years Bal Harbour shops had been a landlord. Now, we were about to become a retailer and a restauranteur. They say the hardest type of start-up in digital is a marketplace. Here we were about to become a retailer that would compete against the likes of Nordstrom, Sacks Fifth Avenue, and Neiman Marcus along with the plethora of equally brilliant boutiques in every market. At the same time, we were about to launch a 150-seat, fine-dining restaurant. It was a whole new world.
AND…we would be doing it in a pop-up format…something again, we knew nothing about…
Yes, we were nuts!
Having spent my career in an industry that people purchased to help them grow their business; I was comfortable with the idea of bringing in “subject matter experts” to help us.
The first thing we did was recognize that we needed a world-class partner in the F&B space. The gentleman at the shops who leads the restaurant leasing program got to work finding a partner. Pretty soon we had selected Constellation Culinary. Their job was to help us build a world-class F&B operation.
The second thing we did was recruit an agency that specialized in temporary experiential marketing. After an exhaustive search, we selected a boutique, eponymous agency: The POP-UP Agency. Their job was three-fold: help us figure out how to move, assemble, and promote it.
Luxury brands are risk-averse. As a result, they are fast-followers by nature. This is especially true of the top-tier brands that are at BHS. They can do this because they have the capital and resources to be fast followers. As a result, it was critical before the investment grew too much to know if some would be willing to join us on this project.
The first step of this was to brief and educate the leasing team on the project. There was no doubt that this was different. To alleviate the process we agreed that I would go with the CEO and the team to pitch the project to the top brands and some of the smaller ones at BHS.
The good news was that no one told us our baby was ugly…quite the contrary. The bad news is that they all wanted to “think about it” or worse yet, come see it in the first market. Sort of an “if you build it, I will come.” Many of them, however, asked for more information that opened a crack in the doorway that for some allowed us to enter and become partners.
On a personal note, I’ve had the pleasure of working with a great many scaled brands in my career. Many, like Apple and HP have very cool HQs. However, there is something truly unique about walking into the HQ of Tiffany & Co, Prada, Gucci, James Perse or Loro Piano for a meeting with the President or CEO. There is a truly elegant nature to the experience.
So, like any start-up, we began climbing the sales hill. We pushed that rock and one by one, we started getting signatures.
Now that we had a bit of demand (we were at barely 20% occupancy) we pulled the trigger on construction.
We’ll discuss that in Part 2.
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