The Canadian jewelry brand Mejuri is in the midst of an aggressive retail expansion, adding to its now 50-plus fleet of owned stores in local and international markets.
The brand is expanding further into wholesale, but with a twist: focusing only on concessions, or shop-in-shops. After piloting two shop-in-shops in Canadian luxury department store Holt Renfrew last year, Mejuri is now opening its first U.S. shop-in-shop with Nordstrom.
The 300-square-foot space, which opened in Nordstrom’s flagship on 57th Street in Manhattan on October 10, carries a wide selection of Mejuri’s core products, including its popular hoop earrings. Mejuri’s svp of retail, Courtney Hawkins, told Glossy that the shop was designed in purposeful contrast to the standard department store jewelry section. None of the jewelry is below a glass barrier, and there’s no need to have an associate pull out pieces one by one for the customer.
Mejuri, which has opened 14 standalone stores this year and is primarily a DTC brand, is one of many brands seeing the appeal of deeper wholesale relationships. At a time when customer acquisition and marketing are becoming more challenging and expensive, fashion brands are increasingly seeing wholesale as a solution. But brands and retailers alike are increasingly interested in more collaborative models like concessions.
“From what I find, doing retail for quite some time in my career, it’s important to think about the total addressable market,” Hawkins said. “When we’re looking at wholesale, we’re thinking, ‘What customer will this help us reach that we can’t reach on our own?’ When you start to integrate both DTC and wholesale into a complete strategy, that’s when you really start to accelerate.”
A retail concession typically works by giving more autonomy to the brands, letting them design and staff the store-within-a-store and sharing the revenue. It requires a deeper collaboration between brand and retailer, since they share a space and revenue. Brands may have dozens of regular wholesale accounts, but only a few concessions, given the larger investment of time and resources.
Nordstrom explicitly laid out a plan to grow its shared revenue concessions from 5% of its business to 30% in 2021. Since then, it has continued to court DTC-heavy brands like Princess Polly and Aligne, both of whom have also opened concessions with Nordstrom in the last year. Nordstrom also does concessions with niche and specialty retailers like Watchfinder.
And it’s not just Nordstrom banking on concessions. In the last three months, U.K. retailers like Next have started expanding their concessions, and Nike is set to open its first concession store in London this year.
At a panel discussion in Manhattan on Wednesday, hosted by the fashion legal consultancy Fixer Advisory, multiple fashion executives told Glossy they’re taking a similar approach to wholesale. Stephanie Unwin, president of Veronica Beard, said that when the company launched, it was entirely wholesale. These days, direct-to-consumer has grown to be 65% of its business, but Unwin said wholesale still remains an important channel for the brand. It’s now doing fewer but deeper partnerships with a select few, big retailers like Neiman Marcus, Saks Fifth Avenue and Bloomingdale’s.
“We believe in all channels, and wholesale is still super important,” Unwin said. “Most people are still shopping in a multibrand retailer first and then come to the brand directly. Wholesale is still the place of discovery, and it’s still one of the best marketing vehicles we have.”
Unwin cited Veronica Beard’s Dickey jacket as a good example of how the two channels can work together. The jacket is sold at many department stores, but the swappable inserts for the jacket are only found in the brand’s direct channels. People buy the jacket first from a department store, then come to the brand to get new inserts.
Kimmy Scotti, the founder and managing partner of the venture capital firm Neon, has invested in and helped build brands like Hill House, which have navigated the wholesale and DTC balance. She told Glossy that a desirable wholesale partnership doesn’t just have to be about volume of sales.
“It can be a blue check next to your name to be in a big department store,” Scotti said. “It can lend you a lot of credibility. It’s important to know what you’re getting out of the wholesale relationship.”
Mejuri is based in Toronto and has been looking to expand its U.S. business. Mejuri has around 3 million regular customers and 56 stores across North America, the U.K. and Australia.
“When we opened our concessions with Toronoto-based Holt Renfrew, we saw an influx of new customers, and we feel strongly that the same thing will happen with Nordstrom,” Hawkins said.
