New York’s 5th Avenue has long been the world’s premier destination for luxury shopping and consistently ranks as having the most expensive retail spaces on a cost per square foot basis. Most of the world’s prestigious luxury houses have flagship stores on “the most expensive street in the world,” including Versace, Bvlgari, Lord & Taylor, Louis Vuitton, Cartier, Chanel, Gucci, Prada, Harry Winston and Armani.
Flagships often serve as the focal point of U.S. marketing and public relations efforts and play a significant role in creating brand awareness. As anyone who has ever walked along the avenue around Christmas can attest, these stores are huge tourist destinations and gross significantly more than branch stores.
Today we take a look at 3 venerable institutions of luxury shopping on New York’s 5th Avenue: the flagship stores of Tiffany & Co, Saks Fifth Ave and the two Bergdorf Goodman stores.
Though the Saks store sports the highest revenues, Tiffany does more with less space, generating sales of nearly $6,600 per square foot. This is double the overall company average, nearly 4 times more than the Bergdorf stores and over 6 times more than Saks. Though they don’t release financial figures, we estimate all three top the nearly 100-year old, 611,000 square foot Lord & Taylor flagship, which we estimate does less than $400 in sales per sq ft.
However, none of these chains can even come close to comparing to Apple, which enjoys overall company retail sales per square foot of nearly $6,000. Even more incredible is the 5th Ave flagship store – analyst estimates put annual turnover at between $350 million and $440 million for the 10,000 square foot glass cube – implying an unheard of sales per square foot of $35,000 to $44,000.
