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Kitson to Open New Stores

After opening a 15,000-square-foot Las Vegas emporium on March 28, Los Angeles–headquartered boutique chain Kitson is on the move again.

In mid-October, it is scheduled to open a 6,000-square-foot boutique in Westfield Santa Anita in Arcadia, Calif. In November, it is scheduled to open a 3,600-square-foot shop in Brea Mall, which is owned and operated by Simon Property Group in Brea, Calif., said Fraser Ross, Kitson’s founder.

The Brea location will be the 24th Kitson store run by the privately held company, which continues to chart a course for growth. It is scheduled to open a Tokyo flagship store in 2015 and will close six smaller Tokyo Kitson boutiques by the end of this year. Ross also intends to open several more U.S. stores, which will rival the Las Vegas store in square footage.

Ross plans to build the new stores in “A”-class retail areas that enjoy heavy foot traffic. It’s too hard to conduct a profitable bricks-and-mortar store outside of the “A” malls, he said. “If you are not in the right mall, you can’t survive. … If it is not in a trafficked area, they’ll go online,” he said of consumers.

Kitson also maintains a popular e-commerce site (www.shopkitson.com). However, Ross is bidding for the increased buying power that comes with size. “The bigger we get, the more we can do exclusives. That is what we are developing,” he said. He forecasted that Kitson’s margins will increase with size and the shop can have better control on vendors’ markdowns. Kitson runs an outlet store in Camarillo, Calif., but generally aims to avoid markdowns at its full-price stores.

Kitson started business in 2000 on Los Angeles’ Robertson Boulevard, when it was dominated by independent retailers. Now Kitson is among a couple of indie, multi-line retailers still doing business on the street. The retailer maintains its fuel for growth because it offers “entertainment shopping,” or retail with a pop-culture edge that can’t be reproduced online, Ross said. It also offers shopping categories such as books and kids’ clothes, which are little seen at malls, Ross said.

The retailer also runs two stores at Los Angeles International Airport. While the stores are very popular, Ross forecasted that he would not open more airport stores because the process of opening in an airport is too dominated by local politics.

Ross did not forecast how big the fleet of his Kitson stores would grow, but he was bullish on the future of bricks-and-mortar stores and their mutually beneficial relation with e-commerce. “People still go out and shop. We’re entertainment,” he said. “The more eyes that see your stores, the more eyes will go to your website.”

However, he qualified the relationship between online and physical retail. “Your website should make up, at most, 15 percent of your business,” he said, “[If e-commerce accounts for more sales than bricks-and-mortar], you shouldn’t have bricks and mortar.”