A reading room. A rooftop garden with Italian honey bees. Art exhibitions featuring the works of local artists. And a guest-in-residence bedroom.
What may sound like a luxurious retreat is actually a grocery store on a busy stretch of Canal Street in SoHo, one of New York’s most fashionable neighborhoods.
Happier Grocery opened in 2023 and debuted its event space, called the Apartment, the next year. It has hosted chess nights, family-style dinner parties with chefs, yoga and breath work classes, and knitting workshops led by Ella Emhoff, daughter of the former Second Gentleman of the United States, among other experiences. There is, of course, a podcast.
It has an actual grocery store, too, selling things like Oishii strawberries from Japan, glass jugs of pink-hued almond milk, powdered organ supplements and branded merchandise displayed in refrigerators — all at prices New Yorkers wouldn’t wildly protest. (Just for comparison: A mango smoothie at Happier Grocery is under $14, while one at Erewhon, another premium grocer, sells for $20.)
But at Happier Grocery the food sales are, perhaps, beside the point: When The New York Times asked Wells Stellberger, who owns Happier Grocery with his brother, Dawson Stellberger, whether the store was profitable, he demurred, saying, “We’re driven by things that really interest us more than ‘this is great for the bottom line, or this would be such a profitable project.’”
Think of it as an entry point for people who want to be part of a community built on exclusive, inside knowledge.
“It’s this chasm that we’ve crossed, where grocery stores themselves have become a way of signaling taste,” said Andrea Hernández, who writes a Substack newsletter called Snaxshot on grocery store trends. “You could get groceries from anywhere, but the fact that you’re choosing to go to Happier Grocery allows them to be like, what is the Happier Grocery lifestyle? Nobody asked what kind of art gallery curation a grocery store would look like, but now we know.”
The idea, then, is that once enough people are collected, the business opportunities are endless. Those people could potentially become part of Happier Grocery’s universe, an umbrella that includes an office space, event spaces, a members-only club and a hotel in development.
Fred Hart, a design and branding consultant for consumer brands that include Califia, Recess and Momofuku, some of which are stocked at Happier Grocery, said he believed the Stellbergers were focused on “building the community” first, then looking at “what business opportunities are there to cater to all these people that care so passionately about me?”
The art gallery, the chef tastings and all the other experiences the store offers are “all catering to the same audience.”
That cultural phenomenon, albeit a small one so far, is starting to get more popular with high-end grocery stores. Meadow Lane, a gourmet grocery in Tribeca, had already built a large following on TikTok months before it opened in November. Sammy Nussdorf, the store’s owner and heir to a billionaire’s fortune, has said he is scoping out real estate for future locations. And in London, the cafe and grocery store Corner Shop also hosts workshops and events like pop-up dinner parties.
“You have to buy food,” Mr. Stellberger said. “How do you reimagine what that experience looks like and then allow other kinds of activities or programs to come alongside that as well, to make it even more of a rich experience?”
New York is full of high-end grocery stores, including Zabar’s and Eataly, and brands having event spaces and studios connected to their stores isn’t new. The clothing line Alo Yoga has in-store yoga studios, for example — a way to bring in additional revenue and build more trust (and, it hopes, spending).
But those businesses still depend on their goods to turn a profit. In Happier Grocery’s case, the idea is more about taking a run-of-the-mill business and turning it into a lifestyle brand — all you need is the right setting and more than enough funding. WeWork, which tried to do so with office rentals, is a cautionary tale of what can happen when the cash runs out.
What Happier is doing is something that grocery stores haven’t really done, according to Mr. Hart. He said typical grocery stores are all about “get as many people in and out of stores buying the product,” but at Happier, “these guys are like, ‘No, we’ll focus on building a group, and then we’ll figure out all the different things we can sell.’”
Neither the Stellbergers, Mr. Nussdorf nor the people behind Corner Shop had any experience in the grocery store business before their current ventures. Dawson Stellberger spent the past two decades in real estate and is the founder of Bushwack Capital, a real estate development firm that owns commercial properties in Bushwick, Brooklyn. He is an owner of the popular music venue Elsewhere and is behind a 154-room, geothermal-powered hotel in development.
Wells Stellberger was formerly a designer at Marc Jacobs, according to his LinkedIn profile. He owned a popular restaurant in Bushwick called Outerspace, which abruptly closed in 2021 after reports of an exploitative work environment.
The brothers are also partners in WSA, an office tower in the Financial District known for splashy parties attended by artists, celebrities and influencers. (Emily Ratajkowski, Kendall Jenner, Lana Del Rey and Bad Bunny have all been to parties at WSA.)
The people behind WSA include the owners of Palm Heights, a luxury hotel on Grand Cayman island: Matthew Khalil, a British real estate developer, and his wife, Gabriella Khalil. Mr. Khalil is also a partner with Dawson Stellberger in a number of real estate firms, one of which bought WSA.
Both Happier Grocery and WSA are part of Happier People Management, the hospitality management and staffing group founded in 2020 that also operates the members-only club Scott Avenue Associates; the events space 99 Scott; and Bright Eye Production, a catering kitchen.
In London, the Corner Shop is on the first floor of a luxury residential building, called 180 The Thames. The fashion designer Alex Eagle serves as creative director of the development, and her husband, Mark Wadhwa, is the founder and real estate developer behind the projects.
“Making your life easy is luxury, and access is luxury,” Ms. Eagle said. When asked about profitability, she said that she was not able to comment on specific figures, but that Corner Shop was “more successful than we could imagine.” Access to a “vertical integration of culture,” she said, is what makes residents and office workers want to stick around.
“You can buy your clothes, a beautiful edit of beauty, your food, supplements, sports and culture — and then boom, you don’t really need to leave the building,” she said.
People shopping at Happier Grocery feel the same. Nikki Igol, an image researcher and archivist for the fashion and beauty industries, said she could “spend hours at Happier.”
“I like looking at the different milks and all the different cheeses,” she said. “I just like constantly discovering things. If it’s all in the same place, I’m going to spend an hour and a half there — and I’ll probably end up buying more.”
Ms. Igol and her co-founder, Steven Chaiken, run an archive and resource library, called Library180, in a corner suite at the WSA building. They also curated a newsstand space for Happier Grocery in December filled with rare and vintage holiday-themed books and magazines.
“The experience of a grocery store historically is a very in-and-out experience,” Mr. Chaiken said. “I think that what they’re building is something that’s very community-based and about exploration and discovery and culture.”
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