Can This Really Be Loehmann’s? : Shopping: The off-price retailer’s new store offers big-name labels, beaming salespeople and (gasp!) private dressing rooms.
Picture this: A clean, open sea of just about everything a woman could wear--plus men’s socks and ties. Row after neat row of merchandise by the likes of Bill Blass, Laundry, Kenar, Andrea Jovine, Nolan Miller, Donna Karan, Anne Klein and Calvin Klein--all in a dizzying number of duplicates, with labels intact. A beaming, bobbing sales force. Private dressing rooms for the timid.
Can this really be Loehmann’s?
It is now.
The grandmother of off-price retailers recently opened a flagship store on La Cienega Boulevard. Officially, the address is Los Angeles, but for advertising purposes “we are considering it Beverly Hills,†said a company executive.
There was a crowd of 100 waiting for the doors to open. By the end of the four-hour party and shopping spree, 1,200 bargain-hunters had eaten hors d’oeuvres, sipped champagne or mineral water, combed the racks and found the usual Loehmann’s mix: a hodgepodge of the mundane and the miraculous.
Next day, 5,000 customers flocked to the store, which occupies half of the Burton Place Retail Center. The new rose-beige building, with its Art Deco motif, is just a quick jog from the Beverly Center and a short ride from the old Loehmann’s on 3rd Street, which now offers further markdowns.
Loehmann’s--founded in the Bronx 72 years ago by Frieda Loehmann and now owned by a Spanish construction conglomerate--distances itself from the competition with designer merchandise in the Back Room. And it is there the new store shines.
The old Back Room was cramped and only slightly less drab than the rest of the plain-wrap premises. It was curtained off from the main area and served as showroom and dressing room. Hence, no men were allowed. The big, bright new Room occupies a hefty portion of the store’s 25,000 square feet, is open to all, and is filled with the kind of bargains that shop-till-you-drop groupies recognize immediately.
On opening day, in the communal dressing room (dotted with cubicles for customers who prefer to keep their cellulite to themselves), a woman who identified herself as a writer-artist and dedicated Neiman Marcus shopper was moving in for the kill.
She boiled down her selection to a Calvin Klein black wool-crepe jacket for $300, which she verified was selling in other stores for $830; a Donna Karan sheer black bodysuit going for $120 instead of $350, and an Anne Klein black velvet vest for $170 rather than $420.
But out in the main area, Phyllis Ross, a Loehmann’s shopper for 20 years, had some complaints. Disenchanted with the quality and prices in the old store, she wasn’t much more impressed with the new selection. “So far, I think Robinson’s sale merchandise is better priced and better quality,†she said. “It’s harder and harder to find those treasures.â€
Yet she kept on looking. And that is the draw of this flagship. Its vast inventory holds out the promise that with enough time and patience--and, miracle of miracles, with the help of a salesperson--the determined maven will discover the treasures.
