Urban Outfitters announces plans to move into downtown Asheville; reaction is mixed
Friday, July 10, 2009 I have the story over at the Mountain Xpress. Snippet:
National retail outlet Urban Outfitters announced plans on Friday to open a retail store at the corner of Haywood and College streets.
Ken Masri, Urban Outfitters’ director of store development, told a downtown development advisory board that it hoped to open in the former CVS drug store location by fall. Urban Outfitters plans to remove the plaster covering the exterior of the building to expose original brick, Masri said, and improve the “eyesore” of a building. The two-story, 8,000-square-foot store will feature a central staircase, large windows and merchandise tailored to the Asheville market, he said. It would bring life back to a large, two-story building that’s been vacant since the closing of the drug store earlier this year.
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Downtown retailers offered mixed reactions. Betsy Bradfield, owner of the clothing store Frock on Haywood Street, said she didn’t automatically object to Urban Outfitters, but added that “I think if we had more than one national chain, it would be detrimental to downtown. I definitely don’t want this to be a trend.”
Asheville, Urban Outfitters, downtown, retail store
Reader Comments (27)
On the other hand this will compete with local boutique businesses all around. Founded by some fabulous people that make Asheville unique and wonderful. All around this chain store are small, artsy operations trying to sprout. Aside from location in the heart of the southern Appalachains these little funky arty subsistence folk are what make this town what is is.
Yeah, I'm torn on this one. I've never been to an "Urban Outfitter" store. If it's anything like REI count me out. I really hate to see the locals get squeezed by a big fish that doesn't cater to local interests.
1. Asheville is business unfriendly, so don't complain when there are no jobs to be found.
2. Competition is good for everyone. If Urban Outfitters moves into that location it will draw people from surrounding areas that would not normally come to Asheville to shop. Therefore bringing more business and free advertising for area businesses the UO customers pass as they walk to the new store.
3. Urban Outfitters is a great fit for Asheville and carries a wide range of household goods as well as clothing and shoes for all ages. Kind of like a Pottery Barn meets Old Navy, only hipper.
4. All you idiots that complain about chains. What about the banks, gas stations etc. Do you want them to go as well. Of course you don't because that would be a hassle for you. People that complain about chains are selfish and obviously employed. You would never hear an unemployed person complain about a new employer coming to town, regardless of wether they are a chain or not.
I hope it works out. BTW, it is definitely NOT an REI kind of place. I wouldn't call it a Pottery Barn meets Old Navy either. It's way cooler and funkier than either of those stores would ever hope to be.
If Urban Outfitters brings more people to downtown then everyone will prosper, especially Union.
It's the Wal-Mart effect. They have such buying power that local stores can't afford to match their prices.
Personally, I think this will be good for those businesses. It is unlikely that anyone will go downtown to shop only at UO (unlike a chain restaurant), and their customers' demographics probably line up quite nicely with those of the other stores.
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Square who got hip to urban chic
Urban Outfitters is a triumph of marketing - a hugely successful business that has disguised the gap between what it is and what its customers suppose it to be.
Walk into the store on Kensington High Street and be convinced you have entered a world run by a new breed of hippies - cooler and more sarcastic than the originals, and with better dress sense.
The staff look like students because many of them are, and everything in the shop blares detachment - a major attraction to twentysomethings who just can't resist an ironic T-shirt and thirtysomethings still trying to pull off the old look. The stores have already conquered New York and London. Ireland is next.
Quiet man: To expand, Richard Hayne needs to stay in the backgroundIt seems unlikely that many of the staff or the customers know much about the owner and boss of Urban - a brilliant retailer called Richard Hayne whose views would be a serious risk to sales were his profile to rise.
Hayne started the business in the 1970s, taking it public in 1993 and bringing it to Britain in 1998. He is still the biggest shareholder and a seriously rich man - a billionaire by some estimates. You only have to look to see that there is nothing remotely hip about him. There is surely a bigger gulf between Hayne and his customer base than any other High Street retailer.
Shopping in Urban makes you feel like you are somewhere radically Left-wing, an antidote to the corporate blandness of The Gap. But Hayne is a stanch conservative who donates money to Republican politicians, not least Rick Santorum, a now failed Senator whose views on homosexuality are both bizarre and old-fashioned.
Hayne doesn't give many interviews precisely because he's afraid that college slackers who get to know him will suddenly realise that buying his clothes is like giving cash to George Bush.
Once described as projecting a "Dick Cheney-esque aura of no-nonsense grayflannel gravitas", Hayne must be the only retailer whose expansion plans depend on no one finding out who he really is.
Despite the strife in the sector, Urban just beat Wall Street profit expectations yet again. So far, the illusion is holding up perfectly.
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Let's make tax
There are many examples around the world of modern cities that have local business flavor mixed with retail chains. (Copenhagen, Paris, Munich, Stockholm...) The location and design of the building I saw will give the old CVS building downtown across from Pritchard Park a much needed breath of fresh air. I even believe the employees will be required to bathe before working.
The key is balance.
I'm all for balance of commerce in downtown between chains & local independent business, although I'll always shop local if given the choice. Money spent in locally owned businesses have 3x the impact on your community as dollars that are spent at national chains.
Regardless, after a lot of thought on the subject this weekend, my conclusion is that ethical consumerism is really the topic at hand. Chains like Mellow Mushroom put money & support back into the communities where they set up shop. A closer look at UO and one can see that there is little that is ethical in their practices or their consumerism.
One of my main contentions with UO is not only the practicality that it will bring serious undercutting competition to the indie fashion market downtown, also bringing with it the danger of actually closing more shops & thus costing indie retail jobs; but the greater conflict with UO is in their general business practices.
If one does a little wiki research on the company, you can see that this business makes it profits from exploiting workers in foreign countries (i.e. sweatshop standards, mostly from China or India) and from what I've read of UO consumer's in cities similar to Asheville, the majority of the products are over-rated, under-quality and over-priced. From what I can tell, the only reason folks really like shopping there is for exceptional sales. If a business can have such high mark-downs doesn't that say something about how much original mark-up is in reality?
UO has been deemed highly controversial concerning racism, stereotyping, and exploiting localisms to their worst potentials. (If the desire is to get a few more local activists to take up a cause we'll find one in the development of a UO downtown.)
Going up the UO chain of command, we find the cofounder and President Richard Hayne's is anything but hip or cool - including donating large sums of money to anti-homosexual senators & causes, including the controversial task of pulling a pro-gay marriage shirt from the UO line.
( http://la.racked.com/tags/richard-hayne )
Urban Outfitters is just one example of a company that projects an image completely different from what its executives are really all about. As consumer’s wake up to their values, we have to ask ourselves what our hard-earned money is really going to support?
But the major issue I take with UO, as an artist, is that they have been shown to rip off & steal independent designs, modify them minimally, and them market them as their own. It's all blatantly abundant with painfully obvious examples on this blog - Urban Counterfeiters: http://urbncounterfeiters.blogspot.com/
In Asheville, we tend to pride ourselves in being a community where we are able to shop our values; UO is the exact opposite of what a creative community should support.
I suppose the free-market will decide, and if our local retailers and artists combine forces it wouldn’t be too difficult to get the word out about how un-hip this exploitive chain is in reality. Other cities with communities that have a strong arts & design scene have picketed outside of stores when first opened, handing out flyers with the above information. In the meantime at least they will make that building space more usable.
The City is changing for the better, its growing and will continue to grow. Bring on the growth.
Just wondering, how much money do you spend at local businesses?
Answer, probably zero.
JBo: Please explain how MM puts more back into a community than any other chain? I suspect that Lowe's, for example, puts more back into Asheville via jobs, property taxes, payroll taxes, sponsorships, corporate contributions, employee charitable giving than a MM would in a hundred years. Yet, Lowe's is branded the evil "Big Box" store. That's utter and complete elitist and ignorant bullshit.