temp retail
What’s Your Story?
Manhattan retail concept keeps shoppers coming back with new themes and content.
Beth Mattson-Teig I
t may not be on her professional resume, but Rachel Shechtman became a professional shopper when she was 12. She was at New York’s Jacob Javitz Convention Center shopping for wholesale bar mitzvah favors with
her mom when she had an epiphany. “I looked around and thought, “Holy mackerel, you can shop for a living!’” says Shechtman. These days, Shechtman is doing more than just shopping.
She is gaining national and international attention for her unique retail concept, a 2,000-square-foot Manhattan boutique called simply, Story. “The easiest way to describe Story is a magazine that comes to life,” says Shechtman. This dynamic store changes its theme and its merchandise mix every four to eight weeks similar to a gallery. Story is a culmination of Shechtman’s 10-plus years as a
retail consultant where she worked with brands and retailers ranging from Kraft Foods and AOL to Gap. The core of that practice is integrating marketing, merchandising and business development. Those focal points blend nicely with what Shechtman is now doing at Story. “Throughout my consulting career, one thing that I
found that businesses had in common, whether it was a start-up or a billion dollar consumer products company, is that companies are like the United Nations without translators,” says Shechtman. Marketing speaks Japanese.
86 Specialty Retail Report n Winter 2013
Finance speaks Spanish, and web design speaks Taiwanese. Yet no one in the organization speaks more than one language. “Even if these businesses are successful in doing well, my hypothesis is that there is a tremendous amount of potential and opportunity left on the table because of lack of integration,” she says. Shechtman started her own consulting company,
Cube Ventures, in 2003, specifically to address that lack of communication and promote integrated retail strategies. Shechtman decided to practice what she preaches and launched her own retail store—Story—in December 2011. “It is really a new community-based experience in retail,” she says.
Retail with a twist The Story business model generates revenue from three different sources. It has traditional retail sales from its merchandise, and it also pulls revenue from sponsorships and special events. Since it first opened, Story has introduced themes such as Love, Color and New York. “We choose ideas based on what excites and inspires us both from a merchandising and experience point-of-view, and also based on the time of year,” says Shechtman. For example it made sense to have Love Story in February and Color Story in spring. New York Story ran from mid-June through mid-August due to the spike in tourists visiting New York during the summer. Other ideas are sponsor-driven. For example, Story
partnered with GE Garages for its Making Things Story, which debuted October 6 and ran through October 28. GE Garages was a General Electric-sponsored “manufacturing laboratory” that celebrated innovators and entrepreneurs and provided a variety of educational opportunities, workshops and hands-on opportunities across a variety of different venues.
SpecialtyRetail.com
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