The eyes of many British retailers seeking to advertise that they are global brands seem, in many high-profile instances, to turn more readily towards the US than Europe when a judgement is made about where to go next.
This is curious, as the logistics of supplying stores that are more than 3,000 miles away, at the nearest, are inevitably more taxing than hopping across the Channel to Europe.
That said, the tendency is well established and one of the latest to take the plunge is Supergroup, owner of the Superdry brand and Cult chain in the UK, which opened a Superdry store in New York in November. The 6,200 sq ft store bears all the hallmarks that fans of the brand will be familiar with - from the monochrome exterior to the quasi-industrial feel of the interior.
The impressive thing about this store is that the brand has been more or less lifted and beamed down into Manhattan totally intact, giving Big Apple shoppers a taste of one of UK fashion retail’s more successful acts.
Start-up costs for this kind of enterprise are inevitably steep and the temptation must be to cut corners, but Supergroup has done nothing of the kind and on a mid-week day the store was not short of shoppers. The other point to make perhaps is that Manhattan has proved a graveyard for many UK retailers with North American ambitions, with some closing stores almost as quickly as they opened.
On the basis of the modular nature of the Cult/Superdry store fit-out, there is little reason to suppose that Superdry New York will prove short-lived.
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