This year’s honorees include a Midwest retailer and two multi-store independents, one in New York and the other in New England.
Poppin’ up in SoHo
As you might have read earlier this week, Brazilian jewelry brand H. Stern has opened a pop-up shop in New York’s SoHo neighborhood while its flagship location on Fifth Avenue undergoes renovations. I stopped by the space Wednesday afternoon to check it out and talk with the brand’s executive vice president, Ronaldo Stern.
“We want to keep the brand hot,” Stern told me when I asked why they erected the temporary store, which will stay open through July. “When you open a pop-up, you don’t know what you’re going to get. We wanted to experiment.”
“SoHo is about exploring,” Stern said. “The consumer here likes to explore, and when they open the door (to H. Stern) and see inside, their reactions are amazing.”
The pop-up shop is set up much like a gallery; it’s bright, open and airy, with simplistic jewelry displays affixed to the walls at eye-level, and a few sprouting from the ground.
A minimally stocked bookshelf, contemporary furniture and rope partitions separate and give the space depth.
H. Stern collections offered at the SoHo pop-up include Natur, Golden Stones, H. Stern and Cobblestones.
It’s easy to display H. Stern jewels in the theme of an art gallery, Stern told me.
“This whole project has to do with art,” he said. “SoHo was born on art; the neighborhood used to be all galleries. So we said, ‘This has to be an art gallery pop-up.’”
“We brought two aspects of Brazilian art to SoHo,” Stern said: top, sketches by Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer, and photographs of the Brazilian modern ballet dance troupe Grupo Corpo.
Despite the fact that the brand did not officially advertise the pop-up shop--Stern said they’ve spread the word through social media and calls to existing customers--there were clients in the store when I came by.
They were Australian, visiting New York, and were new to the H. Stern brand.
“It’s contemporary, it’s bold and it’s not your regular engagement ring store,” Stern said.
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