Dubai: Crate and Barrel, the home furnishings retailer will invest over Dh30 million in its first international venture in Dubai.
"With nearly five decades in the business and stores in almost every major North American market, we were eager to expand the brand presence globally. Dubai is a vibrant and cosmopolitan city and an international retail destination. It offers the perfect launch pad for our brand's global expansion. We value the rich retail experience and market knowledge of our franchise partners," said Barbara Turf, CEO of Crate and Barrel in a press release.
Crate and Barrel, founded in Chicago in 1962 by Gordon and Carole Segal, currently has between 115 to 120 stores in major cities in the US. The company opened its first store outside North America in the Mall of the Emirates yesterday evening.
Gordon Segal, chairman and co-founder of Crate and Barrel, says a lot of thought went into the store's final destination.
"My instinct with the Mall of the Emirates is that it's the best shopping area of Dubai. We are very picky about our physical space. It's in a good location and it's much more compact," he told Gulf News.
Multicultural
The one-stop homeware destination will cover a floor space of 25,069 square feet and will be managed and operated by Al Tayer Trends, Al Tayer Group's lifestyle and retail company. Their products are sourced internationally. Around 20 per cent comes from Europe, 40 per cent from Asia and 40 per cent from America.
The company's decision to make its first international debut in Dubai was based mainly on the demographics and geographical positioning of the country.
"Until now we've been very reluctant to go overseas because we've wanted to maintain the quality of our stores in the US and we were never sure whether we could have a partner who could keep the quality and have the style that we needed and wanted to run our stores.
"But what I liked about Dubai is that I saw a lot of varied styles, products and merchandise. The city is much more, adaptable, multicultural and with very good, service-orientated malls. It's also the centre of this part of the world and caters to an enormous population," Segal told Gulf News.
With its middle to upper price ranges, the company is hoping to attract a lot of people from the region and aims to target the tourist footfall as well as the residential footfall.
"We have this very exciting multilingual, multicultural place here where you can really test what works. It will give us a good sense of what products appeal to them, and since they are from all over the world, they'll tell us where to go next," said Segal.
Segal says that while the company suffered from the downturn, the real estate activity in Dubai should work well with the products sold.
"We did very poorly in 2008 and 2009 but we've been coming back very strongly in October of last year. We furnish homes, condos and apartments and during the downturn in America they stopped building and buying homes, condos and apartments.
‘Big shop'
"Our customers still bought wedding gifts and our small accessories and items but we didn't have anyone doing a big shop to refurnish, furnish their second home or third home. In this country, there are so many buildings still being built here now and so many units to hand over."
