Shanghai Retail Exploding

Lane Crawford Ltd., Hong Kong’s oldest department store, will open a new 150,000-square-foot flagship store in Shanghai in October, part of a new retail thrust in China’s fashion capital.

The New York Times reports that Value Retail Ltd. (London), Europe’s most successful luxury fashion outlet operator, will open Suzhou Village just an hour outside the city, where off-season designer fashion will be available at a discount.

And 10 Corso Como Shanghai has opened the third Asian outpost of its Milan concept store in Shanghai. (It’s also in Seoul and Tokyo.) The 27,000-square-foot, glass enclosed building opened last week on bustling Nanjing West Road, Shanghai’s busiest pedestrian shopping street, designed by the American artist Kris Ruhs.

“Shanghai’s vibrant art and fashion scene is an ideal location,” said Carla  Sozzani, the art dealer and publisher who founded 10 Corso Como in Milan in 1990. “I love the proximity to Jing’an Temple and a park. It is a nice balance of modernity and tradition.”

The project is backed by Trendy Group Intl. Holdings (Hong Kong), the Chinese retail operator partly owned by the L Capital division of LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton (Paris).

“Shanghai is the major fashion market in China,” said Andre Chen, Trendy senior vp. “Chinese consumers are moving fast, and they are looking for new and different experiences.”

“China takes time and patience,” said Andrew Keith, president of Lane Crawford. “It’s very different to Hong Kong, and is a myriad of markets and has cultural and physical diversity you would see in a continent like Europe.”