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Oak NYC Moves to Row DTLA
After a four-year run in the Beverly Boulevard shopping district of Los Angeles, Oak NYC closed its 4,500-square-foot boutique earlier this month and relocated to the Row DTLA enclave in downtown Los Angeles.
Oak’s lease for its Beverly Boulevard store had expired, cofounder Jeff Madalena said, and the shop’s multi-brand selection of merchandise had changed to being more vertical. It doesn’t take as much space to showcase a single brand as opposed to many.
Its 2,000-square-foot space at Row DTLA will devote some square footage to other brands, but the majority of the industrial-chic space will be devoted to the Oak brand.
Madalena and Oak cofounder Louis Terline were interested in opening a downtown Los Angeles store, but they wanted a place that offered parking. Row DTLA offers a sprawling, multilevel parking structure and is in a retail neighborhood where prominent streetwear boutique Bodega is located and the highly anticipated restaurant Tartine will be opening its first downtown LA location.
In a way, this new location is a bit of déjà vu. That’s because the New York–headquartered brand had a store on Broadway and Ninth Street in downtown’s Fashion District that ran for a couple of years before closing in 2015.
The store’s traffic plummeted after a parking lot next to the store closed to make way for a new apartment complex called Broadway Palace.
The new Oak shop has a view of the brand’s old headquarters. From 2013 to 2015, Oak was owned by American Apparel, which manufactured Oak garments at its downtown LA factory.
American Apparel sold Oak back to Madalena and Terline in 2016 during its first bankruptcy filing. At the beginning of 2017, Gildan Activewear acquired American Apparel’s brand name and moved its manufacturing out of downtown Los Angeles.
Madalena said it was funny being given a tour near his old offices. “During all the meetings, real-estate developers would explain the site. I would say, ‘Well, we had offices over there for years.’”
