Los Angeles-based HD Buttercup, a wholly owned subsidiary of home and home furnishings retailer Coco Republic, has announced a Design Center concept at 3225 Helms Ave. in Culver City, California.
The Design Center is a “store as a service,” empowering brands with flexible shop-within-shop presence in custom-designed physical spaces within the flagship. Ranging from 500 square feet for the local gifting brand to 20,000 square feet for wholesale brands looking to get closer to their end customer, Buttercup weaves a tapestry of synergistic home brands that define the starting place for the Los Angeles consumer and decorating community, the company said. The flagship launches with parent Coco Republic in 30,000 square feet, Timothy Oulton in 10,000 square feet and key partners including Matouk, Society, Pom Pom and Coyuchi.
Buttercup pairs its editor status in discovering compelling home brands, significant recent investments in store technology under new ownership and A+ location, “home-centric” real estate sites to offer a flexible, cost-effective and productive shared environment solution.
Buttercup’s 100,000-square-foot experiential flagship store at Helm’s Bakery home furniture lifestyle center sits at the epicenter of growth, coolness and convenience of Culver City. The store will benefit from traffic adjacent to the new Apple Los Angeles headquarters and other recent proximate office and content headquarters for Netflix and Amazon.
“Consumers and the decorating community are looking for one convenient center of design and product excellence to start their ideation and home renovation journey,” said Skye Westcott, U.S. president of Coco Republic. “Under the roof of HD Buttercup, we will curate a compelling multi-brand collection that is a differentiated experience relative to the sea of sameness that has become the norm in mono brand, vertical home retailers.”
HD Buttercup Design Center offers digitally native and wholesale brands that traditionally have not operated in a brick-and-mortar setting a path to quickly capitalize on a physical high traffic location for home-specific customers. Design Center can offer its partners end-to-end technology including checkout, inventory, point of sale, inventory management, staff scheduling services, umbrella digital media, ecommerce and social media offerings. As needed, Buttercup can also support partner warehousing requirements and last mile delivery through its owned infrastructure.
“With the launch of Coco Republic into the U.S., we have made significant investment into new and leading technologies to support sales performance, execution and customer satisfaction in a bricks and mortar setting,” said Jack Keifer, global head of IT for Coco Republic. “Through Design Center, we are able to offer our brand-retail tenants the benefit and efficiency of leveraging our best-in-class tech platform.”
Partner brands will also have access to site-specific marketing programs run by industry experts. HD Buttercup can co-market to its database aggregated over decades in the design industry, active email cohorts and a digital advertising reach of more than two million impressions each week. The flagship hosts activation events including a calendar of in-house art galleries, speaker series, networking brunches, influencer events and F&B popups.
It is anticipated that the Design Center offering will be extended to Coco Republic’s additional U.S. locations at SoCo and The OC Mix in Newport Beach, California and 55 Stockton St. at Union Square San Francisco. Additionally, the partner relationships may open the door to comparable placement in Coco Republic doors in Australia and New Zealand, capitalizing on the firms leading market position in this region.
