apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

They seem to be closing other stores in prime real estate locations (like the one in Chicago just posted on AT)... looks to me as if the company is in trouble, and although those stores have high visibility, they are not covering their costs.

The retail sector is suffering because of the downturn in the economy, and PB is aimed at the middle-class demographic which is suffering most.

Read any financial article regarding Williams Sonoma (corporate owner of the Pottery Barn brand) and you'll see that PB has been in decline since 2006.

IMO, it's a combination of things: The overall PB style hasn't changed in years tho people's tastes have changed - PB's faux-Flea Market style is outrageously expensive when compared to authentic Flea Market finds. Nobody wants their friends to come into their home and be able to say "Oh, you got this at Pottery Barn". Crate and Barrel/CB2, Room and Board, West Elm/Williams Sonoma Home and and others are taking away many buyers with modern/better designed goods.

Then of course there's the general mood of shoppers out there: Folks aren't going to buy new furniture when their daily costs of living are rising, their homes are losing value and jobs are secure. Folks are making do with what they have, making less expensive/more unique choices, or are buying vintage.

Frankly, I think Williams Sonoma needs to rationalize its brands and get rid of Pottery Barn - they could consolidate certain product offerings to West Elm and Williams Sonoma Home, and eliminate many of the dated styles completely.

Pottery Barn in Soho. Didn't anyone ever see anything wrong with this picture? Whomever decided to "mall" Soho got it all wrong.

The whole home category is challenged by the sub-prime fallout of slow home sales and retrenching of discretionary expenses. Look at some well known (if not as entrenched) names that are gone or goiong: Levitz, Domain Home, Bombay Company. And I agree their style is dated and lower cost, more stylish options are available.

How many Pottery Barn stores does New York City NEED? There's what was supposed to be the "flagship" store on Lexington and 59th; the huge, recently renovated store on Broadway and 67th, and one on Seventh Avenue at 16th Street. Are people surprised that a furniture store is something that you might actually take the subway to shop in? It's not like only being willing to buy a Gap t-shirt if you can find a store within six blocks!

It's not a very downtown aesthetic, regardless of the financial/rent issues.

PB is boring

Um...who wrote this sentence, a 3rd grader...
"Over at Racked there's no one knows for sure, but they've got some great commentary...."

It's pretty simple...their lease expired, and Hollister swooped in. You know that the powers that be at Hollister probably hit up SinVin Realty and proposed a heavy rent proposal that Pottery Barn just chose not to match. Or, maybe Pottery Barn came to the , I don't know, crazy realization that a company only needs one big flagship store in Manhattan, instead of two huge stores (Crate and Barrel, Home Depot, etc.), or GASP seven stores (DWR!).... People forget that Manhattan is a tiny little island, and it takes exactly 15 minutes, to get from the old Pottery Barn in SoHo to the one on 59th Street in Midtown East. It also has a very easy to use website and a great cataloguing program. So just because your neighborhood store closes doesn't mean that a company is folding.

And no I don't work for Pottery Barn, but I don't freak out when things like this happen. As a designer, I really actually liked going into the SoHo store but now I just have to make that much more effort to go to a different one. Also, the massive Crate and Barrel store opened right across the street from them, so maybe it was wise to not play second fiddle per se in that location. These companies have full time real estate and demographic whizzes working around the clock basically to figure out what works and what doesn't.

I have to agree with bepsf. I just laugh my head off when I see a real estate listing describing it as "Pottery Barn" style. Sometimes that is not a good thing.

Victorias Secret will be moving into PB space on Michigan Avenue in Chicago. Now that is super scary because the space is HUGE.

Pottery Barn also closed their Beverly Center store in Los Angeles. I would imagine that they are retrenching as home furnishings retailers aren't doing so hot right now. I can count more than 10 major furniture stores that have gone under/closed in the last 12 months here in Los Angeles. There is a huge contraction going on.

As for the consistency of the Pottery Barn aesthetic, if you look at a catalog from 10 years ago and a catalog today, its as if no time has passed at all.

citykitty,
how many push-up bras do you think it will take to pay the rent over in that place?
maybe AT should have a contest!

anyhow, during this last real estate boom, all of these chains opened up all of these "flagship" stores, some times several in the same area thereby obliterating the meaning of "flagship store" in the process... it was mostly an excersice in market saturation ala Starbucks...
part of this erroneous philosophy is that the flagships had the exact merchandise and decor that all the other stores in their chain had, just more of it in pricier square footage. Once in a blue moon they might have something different but whatever it was, you could get it thru their catalog or on-line so the "flagship" did not become a destination per se which is what it is supposed to be...

I go to the high-end mall in my hometown (Denver) once or twice a year whether I need to or not. Two of my favorite stores there have always been The Bombay Company and Pottery Barn, which I visit when I go.

I was really shocked on my last two visits -- a year ago my Bombay Company store had disappeared, and on my last visit just after Easter Pottery Barn was gone!

It was sad. There are now only three stores left at the mall that I even care to visit (ZGallerie, Anthropologie and Sur Le Table.)

I don't think PB is boring unless you furnish the entire room in PB pieces. They have very nice accessories and furniture if you blend them with other purchases from other sources. You just have to know how to incorporate PB with other pieces.

RichardinLA says:
"As for the consistency of the Pottery Barn aesthetic, if you look at a catalog from 10 years ago and a catalog today, its as if no time has passed at all."

Um, well, not quite. The prices have gone way up. And they now make stupid themey things, like that hideous nautical chest and cat-scratcher itchy rope stool/table.

There was a time when I wanted a whole home of Pottery Barn items. But the prices were just a bit out of reach. Now I don't see what I saw in them way back then. There are things they make now that you couldn't pay me to take, let alone buy.

They've made some marketing mistakes. And much like the Crown Books debacle, decided that many stores were a great idea. But they don't have the income to back it up. Because the rents for storefronts are ridiculous.

Mock Wal-mart and IKEA all you want, but they don't put in dozens of stores. They pick lower rent areas to put in a HUGE store.

Back in the olden days, Sears was just a catalog. No, I don't remember this personally. I'm not that old. They even sold homes via catalog.

Costs of things may end up having us go back to that kind of time, where most is done via catalog, and online. More likely online.

Yup, there'll be shuttered stores everywhere. and prices will fall on retail space. and then on residential. There IS a limit to what people will pay, whether it's retail space or housing space. Because there is a limit to what employers will pay.

If an employer can't pay employees enough to live where work is, then there will be no customers to buy retailer's stuff.

TRUE BLUE that may very well be the most A.D.D. ridden response I have ever read on here, ever. FOCUS

TRUE BLUE that may very well be the most logical response I have ever read on here, ever. KEEP UP THE FOCUS

They seemed to close their San Francisco Stonestown store in the blink of an eye a couple weekends ago. I don't think they'll be missed.

Literally two days ago I finally returned a pharmacy lamp to PB, which I just could not take another day of, because the "head" kept falling off. The whole lamp end of it kept falling off. It was the kind where you have to sort of assemble it yourself, and the threads of the part that you're supposed to screw on weren't obvious enough about exactly how they were supposed to fit, so I may have stripped them a little when I first assembled it.

I didn't even try to get my money back, and Lord knows I had no intention of getting another one, since I didn't trust the next one to be any better. I just thought THEY should have to know it's a failure, and pay to recycle it.

However, I like a lot of their stuff and periodically go in there, but I haven't ended up buying all that much from them in a while, and I'm not exactly sure quite why. They're style actually almost coincides with my own, but it does seem a tad pricier than what I want to spend, usually.

Last night, I DID find a functionally wonderful, visually decent replacement for that pharmacy lamp at Crate & Barrel, by the way, which needs NO assembly (although I'm usually good at that). I think I'll still kind of miss the look of the PB one, though.

I haven't shopped at Hollister since I moved to Manhattan, and I'm afraid it will become like the 5th Ave Abercrombie, but hearing just now that that's what's going there... pretty cool.

PB Michigan Ave is closing because they chose not to renew their lease. As a local business owner, I can not blame them the taxes and increase retail rents in Chicago are huge. Also Target and Walmart are killing Crate and Barrel, Restoration Hardware, and PB. People are trying to get that look for less because they really do not have the money to spend anymore.

As far as decorating your house with PB you should not decorate your entire house by a catalogue or by one manufacturer. PB has pieces that you can choose and add to your design style. Their quality is no different than Crates's or Restoration Hardware everything is made in China.