All was going as Chris Green had hoped.
It was Friday afternoon at Ven. Space, a month-old men’s boutique in South Brooklyn, and Mr. Green, the shop’s owner, was swimming in shoppers.
Dressed in his usual uniform of earth tones and black, Mr. Green assisted a guy trying on a to-the-waist chore coat. (“This is definitely the right size,” he advised.) Moments later, a woman entered the long shoe box of a space, declaring that she lived in the neighborhood and was wondering what was going on here. Some fuzzy sweaters on the shop’s ash-blond table caught her eye. Over at the register two men in near-matching slender chinos were paying for their purchases.
Mr. Green picked up a call — his personal cellphone is the shop’s listed number on Google. The caller asked if he had any black loafers from the French label Lemaire in a size 11. They sell for $620. Mr. Green assured him he did, and they’ll be set aside for him that afternoon.
“It’s been a nice response,” Mr. Green said, coming up for air. That may be an understatement. In four visits to the store this month there was almost always a transaction occurring at any given time.
Mr. Green would not share sales numbers, saying only that so far “business has been good.” High ticket items — a $3,300 leather trucker jacket from Taiga Takahashi and a $3,430 leather zip-up from Auralee are long sold out. Mr. Green said he has sold so much product in the short few weeks the store has been open that he has had to reorder much of his stock. “We immediately went into chase mode after the first week,” he said.
A Real Risk
New York’s shopping landscape is a graveyard of bankrupt institutions once seen as too big to fail — from Barneys to Opening Ceremony down to Filene’s Basement. Widen the aperture to online shopping, and things look even more distressing. Luxury e-commerce players like Matches Fashion and Yoox Net-a-Porter have shuttered or been sold for a fraction of their peak valuations.
Mr. Green had a front-row seat to this industry washout.
Born in Lexington, Va. (home to Robert E. Lee’s gravesite and the Virginia Military Institute, which Mr. Green attended), he has been a retail lifer since he started in the stockroom of Need Supply in Richmond, Va., at 16.
Need was part of a pack of men’s fashion boutiques that blossomed in the aughts, lifted by a wave of geeky interest in Japanese raw denim jeans and American-made boots with yearlong wait lists. In time, Mr. Green graduated to the shop’s head buyer, taking trips to Milan and Paris twice a year to select the store’s seasonal assortment.
In the mid 2010s, the mega-scaled backpack company Herschel Supply Co. bought a stake in the shop. Herschel would subsequently acquire Totokaelo, a respected Seattle boutique with a goth-ninja edge. Mr. Green was a buyer for both businesses, having relocated to New York in the early aughts.
It was a moment of bloated valuations and relentless competition in the retail industry. “The growth plan every year was really aggressive,” Mr. Green said.
Evidently, too aggressive. In 2020, as the pandemic unsteadied the fashion world, those stores closed. Out of a job, Mr. Green established a fashion consultancy, becoming a behind-the-scenes confidant to undersized boutiques and brands. In the back of his mind, though, he harbored dreams of opening a store of his own.
The lessons of the past decade, however, were seared in his brain. He didn’t want to answer to ROI-hungry investors or be responsible for a shaggy e-commerce operation with SEO analysts and photographers on the payroll.
His vision was simple: a single store he could manage himself; a couple of employees, some home goods; a bench out front where shoppers could enjoy a coffee.
And most of all he wanted the shop to be in his neighborhood — Mr. Green likes to walk his two kids to school. He got his wish in a tidy, ground-level location facing Carroll Park, four stops from Manhattan on the F line and seven blocks from his home.
Opening a shop that sells $560 wool shirts and $1,670 clogs from the Row was a risk, no doubt. (Cashmere flannels … in this economy?!) But it was a slightly safer bet in a neighborhood packed with tech strivers, lawyers, marketing managers and other upwardly mobile sorts living in single-family townhouses and $7,000 a month two-bedroom apartments. South Brooklyn is a hotbed of $8 lattes, $5.50 slices and $80 haircuts. It’s an area that easily could already have a store selling $910 fleece jackets.
“Chris identified a gap that South Brooklyn residents might not even have known was there,” said Alexander Schneider, 27, who works in marketing and lives directly above the store, giving him an aerial view of Ven’s early frenzy.
To be sure, Mr. Schneider arrived in the neighborhood after an earlier wave of mensy boutiques like Epaulet and Steven Alan populated the neighborhood. Some, including Goose Barnacle on Atlantic Avenue, still hang on but haven’t attracted new clientele with the excitement that Ven. Space has generated.
“The traffic is never-ending,” Mr. Schneider said. “There is just some gravitational pull that this space has that is bringing people in.”
People including him. Describing the selection as “approachable luxury,” his Ven acquisitions include four cashmere sweaters and a pair of derby shoes with noodly, doubled-up laces from the Belgium brand Namacheko that he is “very, very obsessed with.”
In Mr. Green’s telling, shoppers like Mr. Schneider fit the same mold of the finicky guys he once sold Japanese jeans to — just with evolved tastes.
Men today aren’t geeking out about American-made boots, but give them a steely Scandinavian-designed cable-knit hoodie, or a surprisingly airy Japanese plaid shirt, and their credit cards will come flying out.
“They’re very informed, very informed,” Mr. Green said of his customers. It’s as if he lifted a rock and unearthed a swarm of dudes eager to fondle a raw-edged cardigan from the Dutch designer Camiel Fortgens and spend $325 on a pair of trousers with a built-in belt.
Mr. Green guessed that about 70 percent of his customers are familiar with the brands he carried, which range from Dries Van Noten and Jil Sander to more esoteric names like Cale, Still by Hand and Le Kasha. If you’ve never heard of them, don’t feel bad. Even this devoted reporter needed a primer.
“It’s kind of like every single thing you could ever want in one location,” said Jake Bell, 26, a brand consultant living in Williamsburg who recently spent more than an hour and a half at Ven. Space, playing dress up under the direction of Mr. Green and his staff. “They have an ability to say, ‘Oh, you like X, Y, Z brand, here are three other brands that we think complement that,’” said Mr. Bell, who walked away with a shirt and trousers from the shop’s in-house label and a chocolate brown half-zip sweatshirt from Lady White Co. in Los Angeles.
Brand names don’t shout out in Ven’s whitewashed space. A core gimmick of the store is that, perhaps pretentiously, Mr. Green bought hangers that obscure the tags on his clothes.
“All the brands are covered, so once you’re there, it’s about fabrication, it’s about hand feel, those things,” Mr. Green said. This tactical emphasis is another reason Mr. Green is, at least for now, not opening an online store. “For me, products look way different in person than they do online,” he said.
In the shop’s infancy, making shoppers schlep to Court Street certainly doesn’t seem to be harming Mr. Green’s business.
“It feels nice to go and physically see stuff and physically try stuff on,” said Chris Kronner, 42, a chef who lives a shortish walk from Ven. He is no fan of online shopping. “You end up with decision paralysis,” he said. “You can get so many brands in so many places online, it all kind of blends together into the same slog.”
In contrast, the edited selection at Ven “feels personal,” he said. It also promotes discovery. Recently Mr. Kronner nabbed a pair of cloglike slip-ons from the Row at the shop, his first acquisition from the Olsen twins’ steely high-fashion label.
Of the shop, he said, “There’s nothing like it in Brooklyn.”
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