Madewell Remakes Its Retail Experience With SoHo Flagship Launch

With its original cast iron Corinthian columns and enhanced denim presentations, a new Madewell flagship opens Wednesday in the heart of Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood.

Located at 565 Broadway on the corner of Prince Street, the flagship marks a quick return to SoHo for the brand since the Madewell store at 486 Broadway closed in September.

“This is a much better customer experience,” said Adrienne Lazarus, the president of Madewell, which is part of the J.Crew Group. “It’s easier to shop and it’s easier to service the customer. You can see everything. There’s a clarity.

“We can also lean into styling here, which is an important part of our proposition,” Lazarus said, as she gave a preview of the flagship.

Right by the entrance, she highlighted the run of mannequins in different denim fits styled with sportswear and outerwear. Next, she pointed to the large video monitors behind the cash wrap projecting the current fashion campaigns, and the 10-foot-tall floor-to-ceiling windows for more displays and views into the store from outside.

It’s been a year of “significant marketing” focusing on styling denim, Lazarus said.

The SoHo flagship has more space — 6,500 square feet versus 5,500 at the former SoHo site — enabling Madewell’s men’s and women’s collections to be housed in the same store. Women’s, which is on the first floor, occupies 4,400 square feet; men’s on the lower level occupies 2,100 square feet.

“We’ve done a lot of research. We’ve tested it, and we’ve spoken to our customers, and overwhelmingly, men and women shop together,” Lazarus said. Of Madewell’s 154 stores around the country, only 57 include men’s and women’s offerings and typically in those locations, the men’s assortment is limited by the available space.

In SoHo, however, “There is an element of discovery and excitement,” Lazarus said.

And the products, she said, are given “a little air” so they present better and aren’t as crammed in, as in some other locations. Madewell’s typical mall stores cover 3,000 to 3,500 square feet, though street locations tend to be larger. 

“We wanted to expand our denim bar, which is really the heart of our store and the most important area,” Lazarus said. “We can showcase all of our fits. This year we launched seven new fits, and we have our core heritage fits as well. We need to be able to showcase both.”

Denim, she said, is “the most significant part of our business. It’s hot. It’s still growing.” Denim represents one-third of the brand’s total volume, which according to sources, is tracking about $700 million in annual sales. The company does not disclose revenues or profits, though Lazarus emphasized that the brand is profitable.

She reached for one of Madewell’s newest fits, the Darted Barrel jean for a fuller, curved fit on the leg. It’s priced $138 to $148, depending on the wash. “We can’t get enough of that jean. It’s been great,” Lazarus said. Madewell’s vintage wide-leg jean, priced $148, and the Japanese selvedge jeans, priced $178, are also bestsellers.

“In terms of leg shape, right now customers are going for barrel and superwide fits. We don’t think these fits are going away, and the cuff is continuing as well,” Lazarus said.

“Looking forward to spring, we know we’re going back to a cycle where straight emerges. I’m actually wear-testing our new straight-leg jean for spring, and we’re anticipating very big things from this. The straight will definitely be returning.”

Asked how Madewell differentiates its denim from the many denim brands on the market, Lazarus replied: “There are three pillars — quality, fit and style. From a quality perspective, we are using the most premium fabrics out there. Our value proposition is incredible in terms of what we’re offering and our customer recognizes it.

“From a fit perspective, we have a variety. But it’s not just about the amount of variety, it’s about how hard we’ve worked at perfecting it. We have curvy. We have petite. We also have tall. So we want to be able to fit a really wide scope.”

And lastly, through new marketing, it’s about educating customers on how to style the denim with the other apparel and accessories sold at Madewell. “We are really leaning into the Madewell style and how to style Madewell denim,” she said, using one word to describe the Madewell aesthetic: effortless.

A fourth differentiator could be Madewell’s pricing.

“We’re in this beautiful price point where we’re [offering] a very premium product, but at a price point which doesn’t really exist in the market,” Lazarus said. “So that’s been a really powerful positioning, and denim is a great example of that. But we are definitely offering that [pricing] in all of our products. We’re definitely offering a premium product at a more accessible price that is part of our brand ethos and DNA.”

To underscore her point, Lazarus selected a cashmere blend sweater, priced $158. “This would be a premium price for us, yet in another store, something like this would be over $200. That’s the beauty of what we’re offering.”

In February, Madewell implemented a “brand reset adjusting the collection to be a bit more refined, a little bit more grown-up,” Lazarus said.

While Madewell is still denim-focused, and maintains its casual, effortless appeal, “there’s a little bit more of a refinement happening,” Lazarus said. Products reflecting the reset started flowing in the second and third quarters of this year, including relaxed tailored looks. “The momentum that the brand reset kicked off in February has been great, and we just kept building on it. We have been bringing in a lot of new customers with our content and also engaging with our core customers.”

About a year and a half ago, Madewell demonstrated it was intent on elevating its brick-and-mortar retail experience with a store that opened at 1165 Third Avenue on 68th Street in Manhattan’s Upper East Side. The location was marked by tighter editing, up-front styling moments reflecting key looks of the season, elbow room and design details and furnishings that brought an air of refinement to the space.

Yet the SoHo flagship makes a more impactful statement about how Madewell is evolving its shopping experience. “The material inspiration and the design inspiration will be interpreted in all of our new stores going forward,” Lazarus said.

Among the interior features lending an aura of warmth to the setting are the herringbone white oak flooring with brass inlay; the walnut wood denim bar fixtures with greater capacity to handle the jeans demand; an accessories armoire that creates a cohesive focus on the category; a travertine cash wrap, and a custom staircase with iron balusters linking the women’s and men’s floors.

“Let the product shine, but be positioned in a place where the materials and the design are timeless and high quality,” Lazarus said, describing the thought process behind the flagship. “Everything you see here is inspirational for how we want to go forward. We’re saying, how do we bring this to life in other locations? The material selection, the color palette, the way of laying out the new denim bar fixtures.”

Better service and convenience were also part of the process. The 100-square-foot women’s denim bar, for example, is right next to the fitting rooms. “We want to be able to service you quickly with sizes and styles. So we have an extended denim bar with easy access right to all of the fitting rooms. When you’re in one of them, you don’t have to wait more than a second for a style or a size.

“Sometimes I hide out in the fitting room just listening to our associates selling and talking about why people should try different fits that might be better for them,” she said. “They are real denim fit experts. Once you find your perfect fit, you’re incredibly loyal” to the brand.

In addition, the Madewell flagship has made preparations for handling what’s expected to be robust sales and traffic. “We have an off-site stockroom two blocks down because we know we’re going to see very high traffic. We don’t want to wait to replenish,” Lazarus said. “We want to have the replenishment right there so we can be quick. The need to ‘replen’ is so great and it’s wonderful.”

When opening stores, some retailers and brands use the term “flagship” rather loosely to describe many of their brick-and-mortar doors, even when they are more cookie-cutter in character. But Lazarus made it clear that Madewell’s SoHo site “is the flagship, but we do have other very powerful locations — NorthPark Center in Dallas, our Flatiron store on Fifth Avenue store, Walnut Street in Philadelphia. SoHo has the newest design. It has our newest elements. We have men’s and women’s [collections] coexisting, and we have this incredible location which makes it a flagship.

“NorthPark is a great example of how we’re investing in our stores,” Lazarus said. “We just renovated and redid NorthPark, where we brought in men’s, and a new design, and it is performing like a flagship.”

Madewell could open more stores next year. “We are absolutely in the market,” Lazarus said, without specifying how many stores could open in 2025 or beyond. “We are definitely looking at wherever we have the opportunity to either enhance a current store where we could have men’s and women’s coexist, or a location where where we know we have Madewell shoppers but where we are not currently with a store.”

To support the SoHo opening, Madewell has “a very significant launch campaign” under the theme “Made for New York” that plays off this year’s “Made For…” marketing. The campaign involves social media, digital content depicting large Madewell gift boxes atop landmarks around the city, and a New York Times insert appearing Sunday. “It’s like a whole homage to our love for New York that’s going to kind of play out in this story,” Lazarus said.

“We are definitely retail first,” Lazarus said, meaning brick-and-mortar. “Yes, 100 percent we are retail-led, and the proposition really comes to life here in SoHo. Customers are shopping in both channels, and they’re both incredibly important, and we’re happy with both.”

But the SoHo flagship and the brick-and-mortar fleet, as Lazarus said, are “really core to the brand.”