CBRE’s Susan Kurland on American Girl’s Expansion and KidZania’s Invasion
By Daniel Edward Rosen May 23, 2012 10:30 am
reprintsAs you have been active in the Meatpacking District in the past, what changes have you seen happening there?
I just leased 180,000 [square] feet in the last two years, so I can tell you everything about the Meatpacking District. Here’s what’s changed: what’s changed really is 14th Street, because people originally looked at the Meatpacking District and 14th Street was the street. You had Jeffries and, just like you’re saying, Stella McCartney—all those types of people. What’s happened, and what’s changing today, is the fashion tenants, and if you really walk around the area, you will find that the fashion tenants are more on Washington, Gansevoort, Little West 12th.
What you’re finding now on 14th Street are, like, we just did the Uggs deal, we had Levis—14th Street is more what you’d expect: your traditional regular retailers. That’s why those other tenants are moving away. But you have a lot of fashion tenants and people say, ‘wow, do they do business?’ There are some stores there, and I am not going to name them, because I don’t want this in print, but that’s some of their highest-growing stores in the chain. People don’t understand the Meatpacking district. It must be [American Express] Black Cards; people just come and put it in the back of the limo and go.
You have so many more things that are important, particularly the Whitney Museum, which again is a huge draw. If you spend a Saturday afternoon there and you mill around and go eat in restaurants, there’s a lot of international speak. It’s very international, like Soho is. Once that happened, the trends start—it’s going to keep going, because I believe you are in the beginning of a lot of development. There are a number of very important development sites in the Meatpacking district today.
What are some of the recent deals you’ve worked on nationally?
Well, I do American Girl all over the place. We just closed a deal in Florida, we just closed a deal [in] Ohio.
I just do these constant [deals] all over the country. I have two more leases out with them now. But I’ve done them like I did here. The store in New York is 50-some-odd-thousand [square] feet, the store on North Michigan Avenue [in Chicago] 50-some-odd-thousand [square] feet. The deal at The Grove was 40-some-odd-thousand [square] feet. After that, there were deals like one in Boston that was 25,000 feet, and now they tend not to be much bigger than 15,000 [square] feet. But I’ve done, I don’t know, since I’ve been here, probably 15 of them.
Do you think New York City is a good test market for national or international chains before they venture farther out into other cities?
I don’t think from a psychological perspective they look at New York as a test market, because it’s also the most expensive market. I think a lot of concepts are actually tested in Chicago. I think everybody wants to be in New York, because it’s the greatest branding opportunity you have any place in the world. And so what’s so interesting is like, for American Girl, you would be shocked by the number of calls I get internationally to see if they’ll come there. And I’ll sit there scratching my head. ‘It’s called American Girl!’ (laughs). I have people from other parts of the world call to see if they could get a franchise to it. And that happened really from the New York store, maybe Chicago, too, because it is a little bit international.
There are other concepts that we are representing on a larger basis, like KidZania. That’s like 75,000-[square]-foot stores … and I’ve sort of touched the market a little bit and now I am told that by mid-end of summer, we’re going to start to really go to the market in a very serious way.
Where are you looking?
Our first markets are going to be New York, Chicago and L.A., and go from there.
With KidZania, one of the opportunities we have is one—and it’s a good property—[that has] two movie theaters. Well, neither one of them was really state-of-the-art, you know, 20 screens or whatever, so what they’re doing with us is they’re looking at expanding the other movie theater box to incorporate our needs for that. So I think you’re going to have big changes of use in some of those big boxes. But I think when you look at all the inline-retailer, the smaller shops, I think the important properties are doing very well now, actually.
I continually, on a daily basis, get calls for KidZania, which you probably don’t know a lot about, because it’s not in this country yet. The retail concept is probably one of the most brilliant I’ve seen any place, and it’s huge. The small format is 75,000 [square] feet. The large format is 150,000 [square] feet.
Everybody now wants that concept to anchor their projects, so it’s interesting.
drosen@observer.com
