Vegas Magazine - Niche Media - There is a place beyond the crowds, beyond the ropes, where dreams are realized and success is celebrated. You are invited.
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hen Rita Rudner needs to blow off steam, she goes shopping for Louis Vuitton—often with a friend so obsessed with luxury brands, she named her children Marcus and Neiman. Or so Rudner tells her fans at The Venetian Resort Hotel Casino. Even if the soft-spoken comic is jesting, she points out a greater truth. In a city famed for gambling, world-class headliners, and high-energy clubbing, it is luxury retail that now lures many of the world's biggest spenders to the Strip. The recent explosion of the highest-end designer stores gives fashion junkie Rudner the opportunity to satisfy her Vuitton obsession at any one of six (yes, six) retail locations that grace the 4.2-mile-long stretch. Some recent facts about the $90 billion-a-year Vegas economy: After 20 months of steady growth, the number of visitors is just about back to its 2007 levels—once again approaching 40 million a year. But despite the upswing in the actual volume of people here, dollars spent gaming, top- end hotel rates, and housing prices are still struggling. It is high-end retail that is currently the brightest spot in the city, its growth "significantly" exceeding the broad two to four percent recovery, according to Stephen Brown, a professor of economics who teaches at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Retail, in fact, has become the third leg of the Vegas formula, along with gaming and entertainment, soft-pillowing the casino and hotel com- plexes through hard times. "Going back 10 to 20 years, Las Vegas entertainment was looked upon as an evening out on the town kind of thing," says Maureen Crampton, business development and marketing direc- tor for The Forum Shops at Caesars. "It has evolved into a multidestination resort with shopping rising to one of the top three rea- sons people come here." In these strange economic times, Brown highlights four reasons for this surge in Strip shopping: unleashed pent-up demand; newly enriched Asians, especially Chinese; buying above their pay grade as investment; and the maverick layout of the Strip itself. Both the Las Vegas Convention & Visitors those The Forum Shops, with its array of 160 stores, including Gucci, Valentino, and Christian Louboutin, is the most profitable shopping mall in the US. According to Green Street investment analysts, while a healthy mall shop will earn $420 per square foot, The Forum Shops, at a recession- denying 100 percent occupancy, earns up to $1,400 per square foot. "This is where lucky gamblers come to spend their winnings—it's a faux Roman monument to American retailing genius," its recent report stated. That need to go right from the tables to the nearest store to celebrate explains some of Vegas's ability to saturate the Strip with brands like Tiffany & Co. (with four locations), Fendi (also four), and Dior (six). In addition, dedicated shoppers are also lured in by only-in-Vegas opportunities. "Las Vegas boutiques often contain an item from a global luxury brand of which only one or a handful are available worldwide," Crampton says. "Baccarat might do a set of crystal dice or Gucci might cre- ate a card game with a leather card dispenser for the table." When talking exclusivity, few malls can match the 500,000 square feet of captured sunlight called Crystals, which boasts 44 luxury brands, includ- ing the largest Louis Vuitton in North America. It even has its own signature "Crystals" items at Yves Saint Laurent, Gucci, Dolce & Gabbana, and Stella McCartney, which beats a branded T-shirt any day. IT IS HIGH-END RETAIL THAT IS CURRENTLY THE BRIGHTEST SPOT IN THE CITY. Authority (LVCVA) and the casinos themselves have made real invest- ments in researching visitors' tastes and retail-spending habits, and have applied their findings on many fronts. In the case of the LVCVA, market research has lead to the earmarking of monies to fund initiatives such as Shop Las Vegas, which promotes Strip shopping centers. "It makes perfect sense," Crampton says, "because when people come here and spend con- sumer dollars, that is all taxable revenue for the city and state." The casinos have applied their own private research to designing and managing shopping emporiums within their walls that fulfill the dreams and desires of their guests who spend there. In some cases, this means offering more than one aesthetic within the same resort. "We have two Chanel stores on property, one on the Wynn side and one at Encore," says Hedy Woodrow, vice president of retail for Wynn Resorts. "The Encore Chanel features a lot of its fine jewelry and was designed to incorporate elements of Coco Chanel's Paris apartment. It is completely different than the Wynn location. One of the things we are able to do at the Encore location is host our top clients. One of our clients' daughters, an avid Chanel fan, was turning 21, and we shut down the boutique and had a wonderful party. We had cocktails in one room, and then moved the party to the other for dinner." Crystals opened three years ago within the five-tower, $8.5 billion CityCenter complex right as the world economy was imploding. But its Moody's credit rating is steadily improving; last quarter it reported a record 27 percent earnings growth, and with an 86 percent occu- pancy rate, senior vice president and general manager Farid Matraki has been picking and choosing to fill the final five retail slots. His store owners are reporting around six percent growth in very large spaces, Matraki says, so he is nipping on the heels of The Forum Shops' per-square-foot returns, and then is looking forward to a long stretch of "mature growth" as bring in their own fans. the blue-chip brands "Especially the Chinese, who buy a lot of presents to take home to their families," he says. Las Vegas now has hundreds of jewelers, up from a few dozen in the early 1970s, when Mordechai Yerushalmi moved here from Israel to found The Jewelers with his wife, Vicki. His company has since grown to 11 branches around Vegas, plus a newly opened Breitling boutique at The Forum Shops. He remembers the city when deals were agreed on with a handshake, and Elvis Presley would summon him to his hotel suite at 3 AM to talk politics. In those days, 90 percent of his sales were jewelry and 10 percent watches, but now The Jewelers' sales are more than 60 percent timepieces that cost up to $2 million. "People trust them as invest- ments that are stronger than the dollar or gold," he says. "Also, they know we are rationed to maybe one or two of each handmade piece—we have people phoning in every day to see if we've got the next Audemars Piguet. Vegas is one of the few places in the world where they are sold." The couple's four children now help run the day-to-day business, but Yerushalmi, 66, is still a Vegas showman. Today, his customers are being filmed for (what else?) a reality television show. "It's about the crazy ideas people have here," he says. "There were the shoes with the diamonds in the soles—we made them. One customer paid $150,000 for headphones—after we replaced the original parts with white gold and diamonds. They were still comfortable, and he had something no one else did. That's Vegas." V VEGASMAGAZINE.COM 107