Why Fashion Retailers Are Opening Branded Cafés And Restaurants

Following the move of Dior, Prada, Ralph Lauren and other luxury brands, other fashion players are tapping into hospitality experiences to create new retail offerings to shoppers. Tapestry, the group behind Coach and Kate Spade, is the latest to tap into culinary experiences to expand into lifestyle and give consumers a new opportunity to interact with the brands. Why are fashion retailers diving into hospitality concepts and what are the clear benefits of doing so?

Coach and Kate Spade Dive Into Food Retailing

To follow its growing wholesale business in the Middle East, Kate Spade has tapped into hospitality to engage with fans and recruit new customers. From April until June, Kate Spade is running a cafe pop-up in Bloomingdale’s Dubai Mall, inside Dubai Mall.

“At the cafe pop-up, we are testing a new lifestyle concept for the brand that offers a joyful experience and sparks emotional connections with brand fans,” shared Liz Fraser, Kate Spade New York’s CEO with Fashionnetwork.com. She added: “the food and beverage options are sprinkled with Kate Spade joy and infuse our brand codes, a few favorites being the custom-made packaging, our iconic spade etched on the coffee offering, or sweet treats made in our Kate Spade green alongside black and cream stripes and polka-dots.” This brand initiative has also been taken by sister brand Coach, which opened a restaurant in the Indonesian capital of Jakarta this march as well as the Coach coffee shop. Both venues are inspired by the New York City roots of the brand, with a yellow cab replica hanging on the ceiling and branded cues across the venues.

Bringing Brands To Life Beyond Products

Why are so many brands eager to create hospitality concepts that span outside their core retailing expertise? The past summer, luxury brands like Dior and Jacquemus flooded Instagram feeds with their aesthetically pleasing restaurants in trendy European summer destinations of Saint Tropez and Capri, while Ralph Lauren has famously expanded its Ralph’s Coffee shop across the globe. Opening food venues seems like quite a stretch for clothing and accessories brand, but the post-pandemic era has brought a new spin on retail experiences and driven brands to think outside the box to create and offer unique experience to its target consumers.

There are many benefits to operating branded hospitality venues for fashion retailers. The first one is to expand a brand’s ecosystem beyond the store and product, engaging with customers in a new way and getting them to interact with the brand for longer. This helps build spontaneous brand awareness and can in turn drive future purchases, especially as stores and products are often very close to these food venues. The other undeniable benefit of such initiatives is the social media exposure being generated: with such concepts requiring high investments to become memorable, beautiful and enjoyable, they are also being designed with the intent to be captured on Instagram and TikTok. This boosts brand reach and awareness, while growing equity and helping to engage with a wider audience with the hopes to drive younger demographics to these venues and to the brands’ stores.

Coach and Kate Spade might be the latest fashion brands to immerse themselves in food hospitality, but they certainly aren’t the last. With summer approaching, we can expect more brands to open pop-ups and unique hospitality concepts to expand their ecosystems and engage with consumers in ways that boost brand appeal and equity while encouraging store visits later on. With retailers working hard to deliver unique, thoughtfully designed customer experiences to remain relevant and competitive, venturing into hospitality has become a popular move; now the question is, where else could brands take us next in order to entertain and attract customers?