Angeles and Hong Kong. Luxury brands usually begin their global expansion
in these cities irrespective of the brand’s origin. In addition to these locations,
other rising ‘fashion cities’, in terms of style and commercial returns, include
Moscow, Shanghai, Bombay, Dubai and Johannesburg.
Strategic store location guarantees a brand’s visibility, which reminds the
consumer of the brand’s existence and core attributes. The store location also
acts as an extension of the brand’s personality and is used as a tool to ensure
the vitality of the brand. Although luxury brands ought to be at the right loca-
tions to reflect their ‘prestige’ status, careful attention should also be paid to
hasty store expansion at the same location in order to avoid over-exposing the
brand. For example, Japan is host to numerous luxury fashion stores which
often have multiple stores within the country, like Coach, which has more
than 100 stores in Japan. This strategy ensures high sales returns, but at the
same time it is important for luxury brands to attain the right balance between
commercial feasibility and brand over-exposure. This can be done through a
continuous evaluation of the costs and benefits of extensive store openings
against the long-term effect on the brand equity. The ‘prestige’ brand attribute
of luxury brands should be maintained through the store location choice,
while pursuing global growth and expansion.
In addition to exclusive stand-alone stores, luxury brand store locations are
also found in high-end departmental stores, where they rent retail spaces.
Such department stores include France’s Galeries Lafayette, Printemps and
Le Bon Marché; America’s Bloomingdale’s, Sak’s Fifth Avenue and Macy’s;
the UK’s Harrod’s, Selfridge’s and Harvey Nichols; and Italy’s The Galleria
Vittorio Emanuele in the Piazza del Duomo. Others are Japan’s Mitsukoshi,
Core, Matsuya, Seibu and Matsuzakaya in the Ginza district of Tokyo; and
Hong Kong’s Lane Crawford. Other parts of the world also have impressive
high-end department stores, which are emerging so fast that the level of
competition has more than doubled in the last five years. Notable examples
are the world’s tallest building, Taiwan 101, where brands like Chanel, Prada,
Loewe and Yoji Yamamoto have stores; and the highly publicized Dubai Mall
also known as the Burj Dubai building, still under construction, set to become
the world’s largest shopping centre on completion. Other retail monuments in
the Middle East include Dubai’s Mall of the Emirates, which houses almost
every major luxury brand as well as a five-star hotel and a ski slope; and the
Villa Moda store in Damascus.
In Russia, luxury department stores include the Grand Palace in St.
Petersburg and the new ‘Luxury Village’ in Moscow. India is also not left out
in prestigious department stores, with its opulent shopping area at Mumbai’s
Taj Mahal Palace & Towers and the Hotel Oberoi. Also, countries that are
usually classified as the ‘rest of the world’ or ‘other countries’, by luxury
brands, where luxury retailing is still in the introductory phase, are catching
up with the construction of retail and entertainment malls. For example,
British luxury departmental store Harvey Nichols recently opened a store in80
luxury fashion branding