This week, Glossy spotlights the power of specialty stores. While department stores’ demands and terms are turning brands away, specialty stores — often offering new awareness, desirable brand alignment, target consumer-focused curations and inspiring physical footprints — are becoming go-to retail partners. We’re spotlighting five U.S. stores that leading brands are betting on now.
All three of upscale womenswear boutique Kick Pleat’s locations may be in Texas, but founder Wendi Martin says her store is defined more by its aesthetic than its geographic location.
Rather than cater to any sort of stereotypical Southern tropes, Martin has consistently stuck to her own vision of timeless, elegant style since the store’s founding in 2003. There are no cowboy boots, but rather tasteful ballerina flats from Lemaire; no bolo ties, but slender gold necklaces from Renato Cipullo.
It’s that consistency that has made Kick Pleat a favorite of designers from across the U.S. and beyond its borders. Tibi founder and creative director Amy Smilovic counts herself as a fan of both Kick Pleat and Martin herself. The store carries a range of other elevated, trend-agnostic brands like Issey Miyake, Proenza Schouler and Mansur Gavriel.
“What I’ve come to realize is that the industry is built with tropes and quick, simplistic ways to describe stores and their offerings,” Smilovic told Glossy. “What Wendi has is a store that appeals to a certain mindset. She’s very consistent. And the clearer the identity, the easier it is for both brands and customers to understand that they share the same identity.”
Kick Pleat has no outside investment, no venture capital or nosy investors swaying the store’s practices to match current trends, and no plans to open stores outside of Texas. Smilovic said large department stores can be “several steps removed” from what the customer actually wants, whereas independent specialty retailers like Kick Pleat are more grounded in actual customer desire in their local communities.
Kick Pleat regularly co-hosts in-store events with its brands, and Martin often plays a key role in evangelizing the store’s brands. Two weeks ago, she hosted an in-store event at Kick Pleat’s newest, 5,000-square-foot location in Dallas for Tibi, showing off the brand’s latest collection, which has helped make Tibi the retailer’s best-selling brand.
But Martin applies these techniques to all of her brands. Last week, she posted a video on Instagram alongside members of the Issey Miyake team showing off some pieces from the brand at Kick Pleat and modeling one of her favorites, a lime green trench coat.
“There is nobody like [Wendi],” said Marla Aaron, founder of her eponymous jewelry brand. Marla Aaron is based in New York and is sold in boutiques across the country and in markets like Brazil, Switzerland and the United Arab Emirates. But 10 years ago, before Aaron won the Gem Award for Jewelry Design from the Jewelers of America and before any international expansion, Kick Pleat was the first store to carry the brand. In December, Marla Aaron commemorated Kick Pleat’s role in helping the brand get off the ground in an Instagram post announcing Marla Aaron’s first shop-in-shop.
“Wendi takes risks by supporting newness, maintains a staff of well-trained and exceptionally kind retail professionals, and genuinely obsesses about every detail,” Aaron told Glossy.
For Martin, the key to building a good relationship between brand and retailer is to prioritize simple rules of respect and mutual benefit. The three things she looks for in a brand are all straightforward: make killer clothes, be pleasant and professional to work with and deliver on time.
“I know it seems like, ‘Well, duh,’ but way too many people in the industry don’t do those three things,” Martin said. “To have them in a brand partner is a shiny piece of gold.”
And on the flip side, Martin said the key to getting brands like Tibi, Marla Aaron and Issey Miyake to love selling with her is just as simple.
“I have to hold up my end of the bargain,” she said. “That means not just selling their collection, but also highlighting the brand, educating the customer on why they should buy the brand and having good sell-through. It also means paying on time, which you’d think is obvious, but not every retailer does that.”
Smilovic said specialty retail stores like Kick Pleat are attractive because the goals of the brand and the store are more closely aligned. Because a larger department store may have hundreds of brands on the shelves, the relationships are necessarily less personal. Meanwhile, Kick Pleat carries an assortment of around 100 brands at any given time, all personally vetted by Martin herself.
“It can be great to have your brand sold at Ssense or another big retailer,” Smilovic said. “Yes, it’s cool to be in Ssense, sure, but when they mark down your product and undermine all your other partners, you’re doing retailers like [Martin] a disservice, and you’re doing yourself a disservice. These designers would help themselves by being more clearheaded about their retail partnerships.”
