Douglas Fir Debuts Shoe Shop as Men's Shoe Sales Hit Stride
High-profile menswear boutique Douglas Fir will start focusing on what the welldressed man puts on his feet.
The Los Angeles–based store will open footwear store DF Feet on March 30. It will be located at 8318 1/2 W. Third St., across the street from the Douglas Fir menswear shop.
The footwear store should have a subtly different personality than the menswear store, which has been open for business since 2000, according to the store’s co-owner, Tino Abarca.
Douglas Fir had become a favorite of glossy men’s magazines, including GQ, Details and Men’s Vogue, for the store’s cultivation of high-end labels such as Paul Smith, Yoji Yamamoto and Martin Margiela. But the footwear store will emphasize brands targeting a wider range of consumers than the menswear store.
DF Feet will offer $75 Vans canvas sneakers to $675 leather shoes by Italian brand Belstaff. Accessories and Germanbased exclusive sock brand Falke will also be available at the boutique. Abarca and coowner Jon Noble did not disclose much information on the deacute;cor of the store except to describe it as “1890s apothecary.”
Abarca and Noble might be riding the wave of a trend that is gathering steam. While women have nursed shoe obsessions for years, men are developing an appetite for fashion footwear, according to a study released by Port Washington, N.Y.–based market-research company The NPD Group.
Sales for men’s shoes have jumped 11.2 percent between 2004 and 2005, and sales continued to increase in 2006, according to NPD. Men spent more than $9 billion on shoes in 2004 and more than $10 billion in 2005. By 2006, men dropped more than $11.2 billion for footwear.
Men typically aged in their 20s and 30s are fueling this new trend, said Anne-Marie Otey, editor-in-chief of WSA Today, the magazine of Los Angeles–based footwear trade show organization World Shoe Association. Like women, they are increasingly making impulse buys in shoes, a trend that was not typically encountered more than five years ago.
“I heard anecdotally that fashions which would have sat on store shelves for more than four weeks are now being purchased in a week,” Otey said.
More men might get acquainted with Douglas Fir soon. Abarca said his business was considering opening a handful of Douglas Fir menswear stores in the next several years. —Andrew Asch
