(Bloomberg) -- A seller of luxury Swiss watch brands will open its first U.S. shop at Related Cos.' Hudson Yards project, joining stores including Coach, Zara and H&M at the development on Manhattan's far west side.
Watches of Switzerland -- with labels such as Rolex, Cartier and Patek Philippe -- is among merchants Related plans to announce on Wednesday to fill the 750,000-square-foot (70,000-square-meter) retail concourse, which will sit between the 10 and 30 Hudson Yards skyscrapers. The leases will bring the shopping mall to almost 60 percent occupancy, said Kenneth Himmel, president and chief executive officer of the developer's mixed-use division, Related Urban.
Other stores include the fashion brands Aritzia, AG Jeans, Athleta and Banana Republic. H&M and Zara are planning two-story “mini-anchor” stores, Himmel said. They will join the city's first Neiman Marcus department store, plus restaurants being curated by celebrity chef Thomas Keller in the seven-story complex, scheduled to open in 2018. The developer has already leased more square footage than the total retail space at lower Manhattan's World Trade Center, according to Weber Hudson, Himmel's partner at Related Urban.
The company is aiming for “a flow just as the great old emporiums would have laid out their department stores in the past,” Hudson said in an interview. “We have a strategy where our luxury brands are on our first floor, our great contemporary brands are on the second floor, and the big volume drivers are on three and four, then our food, beverage and department store” are on the upper floors.
To contact the reporter on this story: David M. Levitt in New York at dlevitt@bloomberg.net. To contact the editors responsible for this story: Daniel Taub at dtaub@bloomberg.net, Christine Maurus
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