75 Suburban luxe

Suburban luxe

Are the suburbs the new luxury shopping destination?

As luxury shoppers decamp to sprawling second homes and vacation destinations, designer brands and high-end retailers are following their path from city centers to suburban outposts.

Gucci opened a store in Oak Brook, Illinois in fall 2021, as well as its first permanent store in the Hamptons in the summer of 2021. Dior has a new shop in Scottsdale, Arizona, and Louis Vuitton opened up in Plano, Texas, while Hermès opened a store in Detroit, Michigan—its first in the state—in June 2021.

Demand for vacation and suburban shopping historically hasn’t been high or consistent enough to warrant permanent stores, but that’s starting to change. “It used to be that our market was too small, but now everyone wants to be here permanently,” Angi Wang, a commercial broker in Aspen who works for the real estate firm Setterfield & Bright, told the Washington Post. “They’re clamoring to get in, to the point where we honestly don’t have any space left.”

Why it’s interesting Luxury brands are shifting their focus away from urban hotspots. “The pandemic has decentralized luxury retail,” Milton Pedraza, chief executive of market research firm the Luxury Institute, told the Washington Post. “It seems like everyone has moved to the suburbs or to their vacation homes—so that’s where the stores are going, too.”

“The pandemic has decentralized luxury retail.”