At Home With Bergdorf Goodman
NEW YORK – Though constrained by its tight space, there’s some magic on the home floor of Bergdorf Goodman.
Compact 200-to-400-square-foot shops, or “rooms,” line the narrow corridors of BG’s seventh level, where home categories share a portion of space with bridal, children’s and the BG Restaurant.
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Yet BG’s home department is a rarity in retail. It’s a select, extensive range of unique artwork, tabletop, glassware, books, jewelry, decorative home, furniture, vintage and gifts, from brands including Monica Rich Kosann, Murano, Hunt Slonem, Diptyque, Fornasetti, Hermès, Aerin, John Salibello, and Kentshire, among others. It’s luxurious, filled with whimsy, imagination and color, and it’s not entirely expensive.
Consider Bergdorf Goodman home a kind of specialty luxury. It’s a high touch operation, requiring a large amount of visual finesse to get right, and lots of care in the packaging, shipping and handling of fragile product. Few other retailers in America try to do this kind of business with any degree of scale. While the costs are higher, the productivity on Bergdorf’s seventh floor, which individuals familiar with the store estimated at about 18,000 square feet, is said to be decent considering it’s an upper level.
Within this “street of shops,” so to speak, there’s a 1,000-square-foot space called “The Loft.” It stands apart with its huge skylight and rotating presentations every three or four months. The Loft currently houses an assortment from The Future Perfect gallery, which is located in Manhattan’s West Village as well as in San Francisco and Los Angeles.
“The Future Perfect is just super cool. It’s very modern for us,” said Andrew Mandell, Bergdorf’s vice president and divisional merchandise manager of decorative home and jewelry. “The Future Perfect is all new to us and to our customer.”
Mandell said that in his approach to merchandising the floor, “I tend not to go super contemporary, though The Future Perfect is contemporary. There are 21 artists represented here, about 100 pieces, all very different. Some are super modern; some more traditional and kind of classic. It’s very intentionally a wide variety of furniture, mirrors, vases, a little bit of tabletop, artistic glasses, decorative accessories, candlesticks. The Future Perfect represents many more artists than the 21 we’re showing so we’ve curated down what would look good together and fit in our Loft space.”
“Bergdorf’s has this incredible Upper East Side clientele. They don’t really go downtown to explore the galleries. I feel I hear that all the time,” observed Laura Young, The Future Perfect’s gallery director. “They kind of see Bergdorf’s as this haven and that is an incredible customer for us.
“The Loft has this amazing cascade of skylights. It feels very modern,” Young said. “So my instinct was, this is my white box, a perfect gallery space — super easy. Then in exploring the space further I wanted to pull forward a presentation of work I’ve done for art fairs historically, that I call the greatest hits. I wanted a presentation of work that really represents who we are as a gallery. The artists we selected were those who come to fairs with us and who have had relationships with us since we opened. So at Bergdorf’s, The Future Perfect is a little bit of everything and a little bit of everyone.” She had the space painted Inchyra blue.
The Future Perfect represents artists and designers who create one-of-a-kind and limited-editional objects and art, as well as contemporary manufacturers, and Bergdorf’s presentation includes made-to-order furniture from manufacturers De La Espada and SCP; one-of-a kind mirrors from Chen Chen & Kai Williams; hand-made ceramics from Eric Roinestad; a yellow balloon chair from Seungjin Yang, and a one-of-a-kind coffee table in sand cast bronze from Chris Wolston, among many other pieces.
Mandell, a 12-year veteran of Bergdorf’s, said he’s done almost 100 exhibits for The Loft. “The interesting thing about working with some of these partners for The Loft is it brings us a whole new roster of artisans that we wouldn’t necessarily have access to because they are working just with galleries. We really work with them to curate and show what they are about, and work together on how it fits in with Bergdorf’s. if we have the right partner and we are on the same page, we will let them take the lead.
“Finding the right partner for The Loft isn’t easy because it has to fit into the Bergdorf aesthetic,” Mandell noted. “It needs to be luxurious, exclusive and different, and this partnership with The Future Perfect met every bucket. Even on the first day we sold several mirrors, furniture pieces, lots of ceramic vases and decorative items. It’s been very successful.”
The Future Perfect debuted at Bergdorf’s in February and will be up through April.
Bergdorf’s home floor also contains The Hallway, where the presentation changes about every three months, runs the length of the home floor typically with artwork, and ties together the various shops and rooms, which can either be merchandised by brand or category, such as for china, crystal, silver, table linens, vintage, food, etc.
“We have to keep enticing our client base. That’s the reason we do these rotating exhibits. We have a permanent selection of vendors across all categories on the floor, then we do these exhibits to keep providing newness in a bigger way than what we do with our normal product base.”
He said Bergdorf’s rotating exhibits have been “amped up. They are more frequent and much more elaborate than they were previously.”
Mandell characterized BG’s home business as a mix of big brands, such as Baccarat and Hermès that everybody knows, and smaller artisans. “Finding the right balance between large brands and artisan products is the secret sauce,” he said. “We always try to figure out what that proportion should be. These [rotating] exhibits allow us to bring in a lot of the stuff we don’t normally have. Several of these exhibits have been very successful and we have transitioned some of those brands into a permanent space.
“We have been getting more artisan-driven in the last couple of years because our client has everything and we need to be presenting them with things they have never seen.”
With the Neiman Marcus Group, parent of Bergdorf Goodman, striving to build the assortment of bg.com, there has been some significant changes in the buying, as Mandell explained.
“A lot of the home assortment was bought by our parent company Neiman Marcus. But we transitioned that so my team took over the buying responsibility as we were growing the website. It’s exciting. It’s a whole new business. We are out there looking for all these different things like rugs, furniture, bedding, really cool electronics, stereo systems that we can’t carry in the store where there is a finite amount of floor space. But our website enables us to expand our range and expand the story that we tell in the store with many more categories.”
On bg.com, for example, a shoppper can find an exuberantly patterned Dolce & Gabbana x Smeg Carretto cast-iron range for $10,000, a Brunello Cucinelli leather cigar holder priced $630, or a can of Virginia Diner salted peanuts for $10.
The inspiration comes from a variety of sources, including shopping the Salone Internazionale del Mobile in Milan, considered the largest furniture fair in the world, and Bergdorf’s foreign buying office. Bergdorf’s also carries some home products in Linda’s, the shop on the fourth floor curated by Linda Fargo, Bergdorf’s senior vice president, women’s fashion director and store presentation.
During the pandemic, “A lot of Bergdorf’s fashion customers that hadn’t experienced the home floor transitioned to us,” Mandell said. “We did really well and it hasn’t died down since. We had our best Christmas ever. This season has been phenomenal as well,” abetted in a big way by artisan product, and the vintage area that draws from a vintage gallery in the city with high-end, midcentury pieces. “It’s all these one-of-a-kind unique items.”
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