Word: retailing
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...Europe's luxury department stores, and the menus are as cutting-edge as the fashions around them. Though designers like Armani, Courrèges, Ventillo, Lanvin, Barbara Bui and Nicole Farhi realized years ago that the chicest store accessory is a stylish café bearing your label, major retailers are just now choosing to create and run their own restaurants rather than depending on outside concessionaires. "It is a completely new era for restaurants and retail," says Jean Paul Barat, general manager of food operations at Selfridges. "Food is now a driving force for bringing customers into stores...
...says the new venue caters not just to the ladies who lunch and their offspring, but a whole new market. "We get the stylish shopper eating here too," says Teixeira, adding that a second restaurant with a café-society theme opens next year. "The store is modernizing its retail and it made good business sense to do the same with the food." In March Harrods replaced Wok Wok - one of only three concessions out of an astounding 22 in-store restaurants - with Mo's, a Harrods-run American diner targeted at trendy teens. Selfridges in the last year...
Harvey Nichols, a store that is often credited with starting the current dining trend, is completely renovating its 10-year-old Fifth Floor Restaurant and Bar, overlooking London's Knightsbridge. "We have to stay ahead of the times," says Dominic Ford, Harvey Nichols' restaurant and food retail director. "When we created this floor I wanted a restaurant that happened to be on top of a department store, not vice versa. It had to be high-caliber enough to bring people in, and that is why we have been successful." So successful, in fact, that Harvey Nicks now owns...
These respectable but hardly astounding numbers underplay a few other retail realities. One: a good restaurant will not only draw customers to the store, but will also keep them there - maybe long enough to shop for something more substantial than a plate of tuna carpaccio. "Each of our restaurants has a regular clientele who come back again and again for the Harrods experience," says Estafanous. Two: the opportunities for cross-promotion are plentiful. "We're doing a promotion of foods from France's Languedoc region, so I plan to put some of the cheeses on the menu...
...Nothing Ventured Retail investors, stung by sinking markets, have also turned away from venture capital. Individuals accounted for 11% of funds committed to venture capital in the U.S. in 2000, but only 9% in 2001. In addition, many investors defaulted midstream on their commitments, leaving some venture capital funds in the lurch...