Gabriela Hearst Opens Second Pop-up Shop at Le Bristol in Paris

PARIS — Gabriela Hearst is back in Paris with her second pop-up shop at Le Bristol hotel, as she works to establish a permanent presence in the French capital as part of a plan to double her global store network within three years.

The ground-floor boutique, which opened on Saturday, comes as the sustainable luxury brand celebrates its 10th anniversary, and Le Bristol its 100th.

The hotel is a home-away-from-home for the New York-based designer, who stays there whenever she comes to Paris, where she is preparing to show her fall collection on Monday during Paris Fashion Week. 

“There’s nothing better than staying over here and seeing my product downstairs,” she told WWD over a breakfast of poached egg and mushrooms.

In their first joint interview, Hearst, the founder and creative director of her eponymous brand, and Thierry Colin, its chief executive officer, detailed plans to widen its store footprint, overhaul its e-commerce site and branch out into new categories, including the launch of its debut sneaker. 

The first time Hearst had a pop-up at Le Bristol in 2022, it was due to stay open six weeks and ended up running five months. This time, it’s booked until October and will offer an even more elevated selection of ready-to-wear, handbags and accessories, including its new Leonora bag, Colin said.

“We are definitely determined to have a home in Paris. We feel that we belong here,” he said. “So what better way than just already to present ourselves and make people aware that we are committed to being here.”

The brand has more than doubled its retail revenues since it emerged from the coronavirus pandemic, he said. Sales from its physical stores and online logged a compound annual growth rate of 30 percent between 2021 and 2024, Colin reported.

“We have had another record year in terms of turnover,” he said. 

The executive declined to provide absolute revenue figures for the privately held company, which sold an undisclosed minority stake to LVMH Luxury Ventures, an entity within the French luxury conglomerate LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, in 2019.

Doubling the Store Network

With flagships in New York City, Los Angeles and London, Gabriela Hearst is looking to open additional freestanding stores in its domestic market, as well as in continental Europe and Asia.

“We want to double our store network over the next three years,” Colin said. 

The brand is mulling a dedicated menswear store in New York. Madrid is also on its radar, as is Tokyo, where it opened its first shop-in-shop last year at the Isetan department store in Shinjuku. 

“Our strategy is rooted in the success of our retail experience,” he continued. “It has been from the beginning one of the pillars of the existence of this brand. We opened our first store in 2018 when the brand was only three years old.”

The label’s strategy so far has been to open boutiques adjacent to hotels: The Carlyle in New York, the Beverly Wilshire in Los Angeles, and Claridge’s in London. For its Paris home, it has set its sights on a location near the Bristol, famous for its top-notch concierge service.

“We know where we want to be and we are waiting for that,” Hearst said.

Although that stretch of Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré has been plagued by disruptions, due to its proximity to the Élysée presidential palace, the designer is confident in her choice. She noted that when she landed on Madison Avenue, that area was no longer seen as a hotbed for luxury retail.

“Now The Carlyle is having a resurgence. It’s the place to go at night, but when we opened in 2018 it wasn’t the most desirable location. But I just knew that when we are talking about true luxury, that’s when a hotel and us associate, because it’s about service,” she explained.

“We will never be able to be where the big, monolithic brands are,” Hearst added. “So I’m not as concerned in the sense of the traffic, because when people know our product, they come. I’m more concerned with the quality of people that look at our product.”

Business remains brisk, despite the global slowdown in luxury spending. “We’ve had a very strong end of the year and a very strong beginning of the year,” she said. “We are not as exposed to the conflicts as other brands that have been overexposed.”

Exclusive, but Welcoming

Suiting has a 77 percent sell-through rate, said Hearst, who offers jackets starting at $1,890 and going up to $21,800 for a patchwork blazer. Some of her sweaters have seen 228 percent growth year-on-year, with price tags that easily run over $5,000.

The brand has a line of fine jewelry and launched its first five pieces of haute jewelry for spring, including a $265,000 ring set with a padparadscha sapphire. Since they were presented to clients in December, two pieces have already sold, Hearst said. 

The label is also working to expand its more accessible offerings, with the planned launch of the Ohio sneaker and a denim line made from 100 percent recycled cotton.

But Hearst credits the company’s strong track record in retail to the early success of handbags such as the Nina, whose fans include Meghan Markle, Angelina Jolie and Amal Clooney. She intentionally withheld them from wholesalers, and used them to drive traffic to her own stores.

The brand has maintained its wholesale network fairly stable since its inception. Retail currently represents roughly half of revenues, and the plan is to increase this to two thirds within the next three years, Colin said. 

It is also upgrading its online presence to make sure the technology is up to date and the experience in line with its stores, with storytelling a key aspect for the brand rooted in Hearst’s upbringing on a 17,000-acre sheep and cattle ranch in Uruguay.

“Compared to some of these big dot-com retailers, we have had a very good year and we are able to expand the penetration of very important categories, like our ready-to-wear, online by replicating the quality of the brand presentation, the service,” Colin said.

Hearst last year brought Siggi Hilmarsson, entrepreneur and founder of Siggi’s Yogurt, onto its board of directors, and plans to leverage his expertise in logistics for the e-commerce revamp, which is expected to take 18 months.

“We want to be sure that our new platform continues to allow us to increase the quality of the contents,” Colin said. “We love our clients to feel that they can live in our stores. We want them to be able to live on our website with the same type of feeling.”

Hearst creates a film for her sales associates each season where she walks them through the whole collection, detailing the sourcing and fabrication of each piece. She also personally interviews everyone who works on her shop floor.

“They need to be hungry for knowledge. Sales is a skill you have to love to do, but at the same time, you have to be able to impart this knowledge, even if someone doesn’t want to buy anything,” she said. “At every one of our stores, you feel a calmness and a sense of you coming into a home.”