Target Corp. is making a style statement in SoHo — zeroing in on fashion as it looks to get its design mojo back.
The mass merchant has remodeled its store at 600 Broadway in New York, transforming what was a typical grab-and-go location with a tight edit of its women’s apparel assortment, a sharper beauty offering and a radically different approach to presentation.
Shoppers enter the 26,000-square-foot store into a round tunnel-like corridor, a journey into the bull’s eye. The Target red is everywhere, but looks more muted and refined on the formed fiberglass foam walls.
Fashion is the star at the entrance, but jackets and holiday sweaters and party dresses are interspersed with complementary offerings from across Target’s gigantic offering, including candles, pillows, sparkling grape juice and stocking stuffers.
It’s a new look for Target, which is keen to reemphasize style and apparel in New York, where it also has a new office that will help it better connect with the fashion and broader design community.
Michael Fiddelke, who’s stepping up from chief operating officer to chief executive officer next year, has spoken about focusing on Target’s merchandising authority, elevating the experience and accelerating technology.
The SoHo store is a physical demonstration of what those first two priorities look like.
“Style and design are at the heart of how we’re deepening connection with guests and writing Target’s next chapter of growth,” Fiddelke told WWD in a statement. “Our SoHo concept store, new Manhattan headquarters and community partnerships in New York keep Target at the center of trends, culture and what comes next.”
Target is trying to make what comes next a pivot away from a few years of post-pandemic woes — when slowing or declining same-stores sales and operational missteps had analysts sensing that the once-hot company simply stopped evolving.
Now evolution has come in fast forward.
“We have been reflecting a lot and especially as Michael comes into his role, reflecting on what makes Target special, unique, but also what’s needed to really gain more momentum to accelerate the business,” said Cara Sylvester, executive vice president and chief guest experience officer, in an interview.
“That’s gotten us really reflective on the combination of people, product and presence, because it’s not just all about product, it’s also about talent and partnerships,” Sylvester said. “It’s also about how we show up and at our best, that design point of view is a way of working, it’s a way of prioritizing. It’s a way of elevating creativity and bold ideas.
“And we haven’t been consistently great at that,” she acknowledged. “So we are committed and recommitted to being consistently great at bringing the right teams together to bring those creative ideas together to be bolder in our choices, not just in fashion, but across all of our merchandising categories. There’s places that we’re doing this incredibly well and there’s places that are gaps where we’ve been maybe a little slow to trend or maybe we’ve been a little risk averse.”
The SoHo store is not a blueprint for what will be rolled out across the broader base of the retailer’s nearly 2,000 stores, but more of a mood board. The hope is it’s also a reminder of just how much excitement Target can generate when it successfully mixes style savvy and mass market prices.
“Design is so much a part of the DNA of Target,” Sylvester said. “It’s really a mindset, it’s an approach, it’s our experience, it’s of course the big things but it’s also more importantly the little things.
“It’s why we put so much care into things like designing beautiful stores and it’s why we’re investing in stores, it’s how we design our app,” she said. “It’s why we care about beautiful visual merchandising. It’s frankly why our shopping cart is so amazing. We have an ergonomically designed shopping cart that’s patented.
“The details matter. These all come through in addition to what we’ve done in fashion, the countless collaborations that we’ve done and partnerships to deliver this on-trend.”
The SoHo store will celebrate its grand reopening this weekend, offering shoppers a kind of split screen on where Target is headed and where it’s been. That’s because the downstairs has not yet been remodeled and offers a stark contrast with bright lights and with row after row of consumer goods on shelves, many of them locked away behind anti-shoplifting doors.
Target wants to show up better at the heart of America’s fashion capital.
After a long flirtation with the city, the retailer opened up its first New York store in 2010 and now has a total of 42 doors in the five boroughs, employing 7,200.
“The world looks to New York and we want them to see Target when they look at New York,” Sylvester said.
The SoHo store came together quickly, moving from concept to reopening in about four months, signaling how quickly this new Target is moving.
The apparel section offers only women’s to start and is a very tight edit of the broader offering at a full-sized Target.
Comedian and actress Megan Stalter, who had her breakout moment on HBO Max’s “Hacks,” is curating the first fashion offering, which will be swapped out each month.
The first floor also has two beauty sections.
A Beauty Pavilion spotlighting the newest products, from the Lemme Holiday Essentials Gift Set to viral hits from Bubble, Hero and Starface. And the Beauty Edit is a rotating curation of Target’s beauty picks, with celebrity makeup artist Katie Jane Hughes kicking things off with the first picks.
“We’re going to carry top brands and top items because we want guests to be able to walk into this store, be immersed into the hottest, latest and greatest trends, but also grab their deodorant or grab some paper towels, that’s Target,” Sylvester said. “Target is all about the intersection of things you need to make your life easier, but also things you love. We serve wants and needs at Target, always.
“If I think about where apparel is going more broadly, be reliable for all those foundations, be famous for Ts and tanks and denim and things like that, and then make sure you’ve got the right fashion at the right time,” she said.
To play that game well, Target reset its New York office situation, closing a small marketing office in favor of a new Madison Avenue headquarters employing 80 people across marketing, product design, Target’s creative and media buying agency Roundel and the New York stores experience teams, as well as Gigi Guerra, vice president of creative curation.
Guerra is the tip of the spear when it comes to Target’s design partnerships.
“The office is already buzzing,” Sylvester said.
