Nordstrom Rack Plans Major Expansion

Nordstrom Inc. (Seattle) is aggressively expanding its off-price Rack stores, with a goal of having 230 Racks in operation by 2016, reports Women’s Wear Daily. There currently are 127 Racks, with plans to open 24 this year and another 30 in 2014.

Among this year’s openings is likely to be a 42,000-square-foot unit in Brooklyn, N.Y. Nordstrom is expected to sign the lease this week.

Rack is also expanding in California, Texas and South Florida and in cities such as Chicago; tailoring assortments to local tastes; opening Rack units in areas where demographics couldn’t support a full-line store, and targeting university towns such as Eugene, Ore., near the University of Oregon, reportsWW D.

With a single unit in Union Square that debuted in 2010, there’s room for Rack to grow in Manhattan, where Nordstrom is planning to open a 285,000-square-foot full-line store in 2018.

“We’ve shown an ability to pursue both full-line and Rack growth” at the same time, said Colin Johnson, a Nordstrom spokesman. “We’re growing both sides of the business.”

The retailer is elevating the off-price shopping experience by bringing technology to Rack stores. “One of the newer things we’ve done is introduced more technology to Rack,” Johnson told WWD. The company late last year equipped Rack stores with modified iPod Touch mobile point-of-sale devices. “We started to learn and add functionality,” he said. “Service is defined by wait time. It’s helped us get rid of wait time in the line. Now shoppers don’t have to line up” because sales associates with POS devices go to them. “What we started to do is remove some of the registers we had in our stores. It freed up space so we can merchandise the store with more products.”