California Apparel News

Designer Jared Gold celebrated the opening of his third and fourth Black Chandelier retail stores in Salt Lake City with a pre-opening runway show and party held Nov. 17 at The Gateway in the Union Pacific Depot in Salt Lake City.

The shopping center is based in a restored 100-year-old train station and features French Renaissance architecture and much of the original artwork.

“It was so spectacular,” said Gold. “It was a venue like you would only see in Paris.”

The Utah-based designer relocated from Los Angeles in 2003, to do business as management firm Gold Fusion Laboratories Inc., a subsidary of Nexia Holdings Inc. The company is now a publicly traded firm on the Over the Counter Bulletin Board securities market (symbol: NEXH). Gold’s apparel and retail division does business under the name Dark Dynamite.

The designer began experimenting with a retail rollout last year when he opened several temporary “pop-up” stores in Salt Lake City, Seattle and in Los Angeles’ Echo Park district.

This year he shifted focus to permanent locations and opened two stores in Salt Lake City—in The Gateway and in Trolley Square. This month he will open two more Utah stores, one in General Growth Property’s Fashion Place center in Murray and one at the Shops at Riverwoods in Orem.

“We’re now on to full build out,” said Gold.

Black Chandelier is currently negotiating with Chicago-based General Growth Properties to roll out more Black Chandelier stores. Gold’s ambitious plan is to open as many as 50 stores over the next three years, beginning with Boise, Idaho, and Denver, followed by Las Vegas, San Diego and Los Angeles.

Gold said he plans to open “as many as we can handle” by Holiday 2007, then move on to the Chicago area and Northern California and the Pacific Northwest.

The company plans to open stores in regional clusters to centralize shipping by creating one “vector store,” which will receive goods directly from Gold’s Salt Lake City headquarters and then truck goods to surrounding stores in the cluster.

Stores will be small—“1,400 to 1,800 square feet is about prime for us,” said Gold, who said Black Chandelier is a good fit with General Growth Properties, which has small spaces available for highconcept stores like his.

Construction is underway at the Black Chandelier store at Fashion Place, which is the “No. 1 dollarper- square-foot producing center in the state of Utah,” said Mark Thorsen, General Growth vice president of asset management and group director for the Colorado and Utah properties. General Growth has more than 220 properties.

The Black Chandelier store at Fashion Place is about 1,400 square feet and located in the same wing as Nordstom and other fashion-forward retailers, Thorsen said.

“We are totally thrilled with these guys,” Thorsen continued. “What really impressed us is the team they put together as far as the strength of the different disciplines— whether it comes from their advertising, store merchandising, design, product management, we were thrilled to see how they were set up structurally.”

About 80 percent of the merchandise in Black Chandelier stores is Gold’s own design, including apparel, accessories and gift items such as candles with the scent of vintage candies. The stores also carry other apparel labels such as Wrangler, Le Sport Sac, Commes de Garccedil;on and Kill City, as well as books from Taschen and Dover and magazines. Next year, the designer plans to launch a line of Black Chandelier denim.

Gold hesitates to use the term “lifestyle” when describing the merchandise mix, preferring to describe it as “more of a culture shop.” The designer describes the concept as a cross between iconic Parisian boutique Colette and California-based music-inspired retailer Hot Topic.

“I don’t want it to be pretentious,” he said. “I want it to be really accessible.”

The Nov. 17 fashion show featured several of the contestants/models from CW reality show “America’s Next Top Model.” Models Lisa D’Amato, Joanie Dodds and Sarah Albert, as well as performer Jeffree Star, were on hand to greet the shoppers at the Trolley Square boutique on Nov. 18, helping Gold achieve the highest-grossing sales for one day for the store.

Before moving the firm to Utah, Gold hosted runway shows at Los Angeles Fashion Week and at New York Fashion Week. He was featured in Gen Art’s Fresh Faces in Fashion show in 2003. Last year, he showed his ready-to-wear and custom collections at the P.KaBu runway series during Spring ’06 Los Angeles Fashion Week.

Gold plans to host similar fashion shows with the opening of each retail store as well as in-store events. —Alison A. Nieder