Revolve is ready to take physical retail seriously.
This week, the online marketplace — known for its sleek and festive clothing priced between fast fashion giants and luxury retailers — opened a pop-up in LA for its high-end division FWRD, which offers brands such as The Row and Jacquemus.
The temporary retail space, located in a 4,000-square-foot storefront in West Hollywood featuring a selection of goods curated by FWRD’s creative director Kendall Jenner, is in part designed to test whether Revolve can maintain a permanent physical outpost, co-founder and co-CEO Mike Karanikolas told BoF.
“That would be the ideal outcome,” Karanikolas said. “There’s no question in my mind we can do it.”
Unlike past pop-ups, the latest temporary store will include retail staples like the ability to request items online to try on in-store, return goods, and abundant nearby parking. Shoppers are also able to buy goods in the store using their own phones with technology from Bolt. (Revolve has offered this feature at a previous pop-up.)
“In the past, the focus has been very much so on the marketing and creative and community influencers,” Karanikolas said. “This time around those things are also extremely important, but we’re putting a little bit more focus on the retail side.”
Last September, Revolve opened a space in New York during fashion week, replete with rooms designed around the aesthetic of brands it carries. In March 2022, the company opened a space in West Hollywood that included a café and a wellness centre.
While multi-brand e-tailers like The RealReal and Farfetch (which acquired the UK-based Browns department store chain in 2015) have long made bets on physical retail, Revolve has been a holdout. The success of the FWRD pop-up, including shopper conversion rates and the store’s profits, could determine if that division or Revolve’s main line will get a permanent brick-and-mortar outpost in the near future.
Revolve’s recent foray into brick-and-mortar comes as e-commerce cools down following a resurgence of in-person shopping. In 2022, Revolve’s total sales jumped 24 percent year over year to $1.1 billion, 19 percent of which came from the FWRD line. That marked slower growth than the 54 percent year-over-year bump it saw in 2021. Revolve’s sales dropped 1 percent in the first quarter of 2023.
