Looking for the parfait store to shop for holiday gifts for your friends and loved ones? Enter STORY, the ultimate shopping emporium for innovative products, which has teamed up with American Express OPEN for its annual Home for the Holidays installation. During a tour of the updated digs, STORY’s founder Rachel Shechtman gave us the low-down on what it took to create the store’s 28th installation, her holiday faves, her dream collaboration and lots more.
Tell us about STORY’s holiday installation!
This holiday season, we teamed up with American Express OPEN, and it’s all about supporting small businesses. We have over 320 small businesses in the store and the final count was over 2,500 products. This is our one story of the year that’s an annual issue–it’s always Home for the Holidays! We turn the store into a house, and every year it’s a different style. Last year we teamed up with Target and turned it into a mountain retreat. When we teamed up with HP the year before, we created a traditional home, so this year we created a modern home. We wanted to take the idea of the online gift guide offline; you’ll see how each section of the store is different so that there’s something for everyone. For example, the kitchen has something for everyone, the garage has gifts for him, and the women’s foyer has gifts for women.
Where do you find these small businesses?
It’s a combination of things. I’ve been in retail my whole life, but I also go out into the market and to trade shows. We do something called “Pitch Night” where people pitch their products. We bring in other editors and stores, too. It’s all about access and enabling someone to tell their story. We also work with a lot of online brands offline, like Bow and Drape, and do twists on different existing products. There’s a book on Chanel that exists but we worked with a company to make our covers leather. There is a fair amount of limited edition items, but we also have exclusives like a cross-body from Shafer LA. Nate Berkus has become a friend after our collaboration with Target, so he did an exclusive item for us.
How long does it take to decide what you’re going to sell in each installment?
It depends on story-to-story, but the entire process took about two months. Setting up the store for the holidays is actually the longest—that takes about two to three weeks, but it usually takes about nine days. We team up with interior designer Jason Bell each year to design the store. He adds credibility and authenticity to the design. We also work with an amazing company called ALU that does a lot of retail fixtures, but you’d never know because they look like living room furniture. And then the main wall that says “Home for the Holidays” was made by two artists: Paige Smith, a big rising star from L.A. who finds cracks in cement on the streets and fills it with objects, and the faux-painted marble is by a New York-based artist Georgia Elrod.
What are some of your favorites?
I love Chiara Ferragni’s slip-on sneakers. Pom-pom hats are in right now, and we found a brand based in London that lets you can the pom-pom. There’s a great soap brand I found in Portland, Oregon. Whoopi Goldberg ended up buying like 50 of them and put her on The View. Whoopi actually came to the store one day and signed a bunch of her books; during the holidays, she’ll show up and do a surprise book signing, so follow us on social media and we’ll give you a heads up! I also met someone from Pitch Night, KAHRI, who makes these adorable dolls [Karl Lagerfeld, Anna Wintour, etc.] and she made one of Iris Apfel, who we’ve also teamed up with. It’s awesome.
How do you know Iris?
She and I met through a mutual friend. We had her stuff during Donald Robertson’s story, but this is a whole new assortment. I went up to her apartment and chose products to co-curate. They’re all her personal collection, so it’s fun. They start at $35 and the most expensive is $795. It’s a range.
What events will you be hosting in-store for the holidays?
We’re going to be open for 12 hours (9 a.m. to 9 p.m.) for Small Business Saturday on November 28. We’ll have a new small business coming every hour, on the hour. We’ll also be hosting food trucks every weekend between Thanksgiving and Christmas, like Waffles & Dinges and Milk Truck, so when you support small businesses, you get lunch on us. Stowaway Cosmetics, which only sells online, is also going to come in for a trunk show. It’s a lot of fun!
How much of your merchandise do you end up buying for yourself?
Well, I love buying everything on the planet, but the good thing is it’s the best way to curb a shopping addiction because I can get all of the shopping out of my system by getting it for the store! It’s kind of like eating the same thing every day for a year—when you stare at it every day, you kind of feel like you already own it. My sister would argue, though, that looking at my apartment, I probably have one of everything. My dad tells me that my babysitter would say that since I was 6 we could never leave a store without me tugging on something. It wasn’t even about buying it, it’s just about finding it. I look at merchandise as content; magazines tell stories with articles and pictures, whereas I tell stories by curating merchandise around a certain point of view and subject. That’s what I geek out about.
What’s something we’d be surprised to learn about what you do?
That while I have a buying team, the assortment of what we sell is all built in my head. We obviously go into the season knowing what price points and categories we want, but what’ll typically happen is I’ll fall in love with something, and it’s that one silly item that I’ll build a whole story around.
This is your 28th installation. Do you learn something new every time?
I think you get a better understanding about what people want and need. Whether or not someone buys something in this store, I still want them to have an experience. One of the things that I think retail has lost is theater. I think the future of retail is about entertainment and community. Those are the things we spend a lot of time focusing on here at STORY, through our range of price points, humor, functional, and stylish products.
Could you see yourself opening more STORYs?
Maybe! It might either happen in the form of us opening another store, or we’ve also been talking to other strategic partners about potentially doing stuff in other stores down the road.
And your dream collaboration?
I recently met Sarah Andelman from COLETTE; I think it would be super fun to do something with her. I’m obsessed with Tokyo, so I think for me it’s challenging myself to do things in different ways, and I think different countries is a way to create that challenge.
Visit STORY at 144 Tenth Avenue, New York, NY 10011.
