Madewell Makes Over Its Store Experience
NEW YORK — With its new Upper East Side location, Madewell presents an updated store experience to better showcase how the collection has evolved this year.
There’s tighter editing, up-front styling moments reflecting key looks of the season, elbow room and design details and furnishings that bring an air of refinement to the space.
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“It’s a new moment for Madewell in retail,” said Libby Wadle, chief executive officer of the J.Crew Group, the parent company of the J. Crew, Crewcuts and Madewell brands. “Our Third Avenue store is the first of its kind. A refresh with a modern design point of view is the best way to describe it.”
The Madewell store, which opened Thursday at 1165 Third Avenue on 68th Street, is a corner site affording greater visibility and frontage. Prominent 9-foot-tall and 13-foot-wide windows provide ample creative display and natural lighting.
At 5,400 square feet, including 3,400 square feet for selling, the store is larger than Madewell’s typical mall locations at 3,000 to 3,500 square feet, though street locations tend to be larger. There’s enough room for menswear, which occupies 15 percent of the space and has been rolling out to many, though not all, Madewell stores over the past few seasons since being introduced to the collection in 2018.
Compared to years past, the current Madewell collection, company executives say, is culled-down, elevated and effortless and with pieces that work with non-Madewell pieces. It’s focused on “new classics” like the poplin shirt, the trenchcoat or a relaxed suit, depending on the season; trending denim leg shapes, and styles and outfits versatile to wear day-into-night and for different occasions. There’s a practicality to it, reflecting how consumers have become increasingly selective in their discretionary spending.
Just past the store’s entrance, there’s a vignette for summer, highlighting a pleated cami dress, and a woven shirt outfitted with an “athletic slim fit” jean. “The entry is the moment where we show our point of view on styling for that current edit — what’s happening right now,” said Garrett Putney, Madewell’s senior vice president of stores. “Throughout, you’ll see some good styling moments, and then you’ll see must-have things like our denim, and our footwear and bag destination that are merchandised differently.”
Along a window, Joyce Lee, Madewell’s head of design, has selected her picks of the season, including striped tops and cami dresses. Gone are the bulky tables up front stacked with items.
Next up is the cash wrap. “I call it the customer hub because we do everything at this desk,” said Putney, from purchases to exchanges to online product searches. “We’ve peeled way back on POS and hardware to really clean things up so the design can stand out.” The counter is wrapped in Italian terracotta tile and has a marble counter so it integrates into the boutique-y feel of the store rather than feeling too transactional.
Past the cash wrap is the all-important denim section. “This is one area of the store that’s not negotiable,” Putney said. “Denim has become a much bigger experience. It’s where the magic happens.” About a third of Madewell’s volume is denim, which has always been the core of the collection.
Elsewhere the store is furnished with puffy chairs, trunk marble pedestals, pendant lighting and sisal rugs. Behind the denim display is what Putney called the lounge. “It’s an area where we want customers to hunker in and hang out with their friends as they shop, and most importantly it’s where our stylists live in the store, with the customer. This is where the fitting room party happens.”
To the side of the lounge space is a run of fitting rooms, redesigned with soft arched entries trimmed in maplewood and white denim curtains. In the back, there’s the resort collection of shorts, swimwear and beachwear. Sunglasses, jewelry and accessories are also sold.
Madewell’s Third Avenue location replaced the unit that was on Madison Avenue and 86th Street. “We did quite well there, though frankly, we love the space we found on Third Avenue,” Wadle said. “We knew we wanted to stay on the Upper East Side. It’s where our customer is for sure. There’s incredible foot traffic. And the amount of space we got, the layout, and being on a corner is really ideal.” Asked if any money was saved relocating the store to Third Avenue, Wadle replied, “Rent wasn’t a driver. You’re not getting deals quite yet.”
While Third Avenue gives the full expression of Madewell’s retail redesign, other Madewell stores opened this year have incorporated elements of it. Going forward, “Any stores we open in the back half of this year and into next year will be much more squarely based on Third Avenue. And any stores that we redo or add men’s and redo women’s will use Third Avenue as more of a playbook,” Wadle said.
Madewell has 155 stores, including 60 that, within the last few seasons, have added men’s to some degree, whether it’s a stand-alone assortment or an edited, denim-focused assortment, Wadle explained. There is also a handful of stand-alone men’s stores, including in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and Austin, Texas. At the South Coast Plaza center in Costa Mesa, California, a space adjacent to a Madewell women’s-only store became available so Madewell added a men’s shop with a pass through to the women’s store. “That allowed us to touch up our women’s store footprint because we were doing construction. So there’s some optimization that’s been going on with our current fleet based on expansions,” Wadle said.
While men’s is being added to much of the fleet, “We don’t want to do it where we can’t optimize women’s, which is still the lion’s share of the business. We are really trying to be opportunistic,” Wadle said.
Regarding additional store openings, “Right now, we are working through our rollout plan for next year,” the CEO said. “We haven’t landed on a number, but many will be dual gender.” Of the 10 being opened this year, five have already opened and three of those sell both genders.
In selecting locations, “We try to go into neighborhoods that are up and coming. We work with a firm that gives us a lot more intel beyond our customer file and we look at colleges and industries that are around.” (The Third Avenue store is a block east from Hunter College.) “Definitely, we’re in sort of the hot markets — young, just very Millennial markets,” Wadle said. “We never have stores in tier-two or tier-three mall locations.”
Asked how shopper traffic in the stores has been, Wadle said, “We’re seeing a lot of people coming back. In most of our markets we’re at or above pre-pandemic levels, and feeling really good about the momentum. There are some lagging markets — we all know what they are, like San Francisco. New York is having a nice rebound. People are really still hungry to get back into the swing of things.”
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