A national clothing store is hoping its collegiate apparel will attract shoppers to its new store in Silver Spring, the second location in the Washington area.
Steve & Barry’s is set to open in City Place Mall at the end of November, selling casual clothing and sportswear items for less than $20.
Two college students, Steve Shore and Barry Prevor, launched the company in 1985 to compete with the University of Pennsylvania’s clothing line sold on campus by selling apparel with the school logo in bulk for lower prices. Their first store, opened in 1998 in a mall outside Detroit, sold clothes with college logos. The new store will feature college T-shirts and sweat
shirts from local universities such as the University of Maryland, Georgetown University, Virginia Tech and the University of Virginia.
“We have a strong collegiate-wear section that carries a few hundred universities,” said Howard Schacter, chief partnership officer.
The privately owned chain manufactures all the merchandise it sells, including its own brand of clothing, which makes up about half its products.
A year and a half ago, the chain added exclusive celebrity lines, working with household names like NBA players Stephon Marbury and Ben Wallace, actresses Sarah Jessica Parker and Amanda Bynes, and tennis player Venus Williams.
The store also has about 400 licensing relationships with companies to use their logos, such as Hershey’s and Marvel comic books. The idea is to create “a stores-within-stores environment,” offering items for different tastes and styles, Schacter said. The company is able to keep prices low by cutting out the middleman manufacturer, doing few ad campaigns and holding down corporate expenses.
The owners didn’t “reinvent” anything, and they’re not doing anything differently from other companies, said Mike Tesler, a Wheaton High School graduate who is an adjunct professor of marketing with Bentley College and president of consulting firm Retail Concepts. “But they do some things better,” and they’re “astute retailers” who know how to target their audience, he added.
Silver Spring is an ideal location, Tesler said. The area has a lot of “economic diversity and ethnic diversity,” which is “good for business,” he said.
Both the sales and the number of stores have doubled on average each year in the last 10 years, Schacter said. The new 28,000-square-foot store will employ about 100 people. The chain has 219 stores nationwide and expects to have 270 opened by the end of the year. Its other Washington-area store is in Potomac Mills.
