What the Best Fashion Stores Get Right

**Sheena Butler-Young** (0:08)
Hello, and welcome to The Debris from The Business of Fashion where each week we delve into our most popular BoF professional stories with the correspondents who created them. I'm senior correspondent Sheena Butler-Young.
For much of the last decade, fashion brands and retailers seem fixated on making shopping as seamless as possible, endless product online, algorithmic recommendations, next day delivery, and brands trying to own every customer relationship directly.
But after years of digital sameness, something more analog is starting to feel exciting again. Walking into a store with a strong point of view, speaking to someone who knows the assortment inside out, and discovering something you didn't know you wanted. That shift is at the heart of BoF's new retail package, The Best Fashion Stores in the World. From Brooklyn's Ven. Space to Dongliang in Shanghai, Alara in Lagos, and Dover Street Market, the package looks at why independent stores are becoming more important to shoppers, brands, and the wider fashion ecosystem. Joining me today is BoF retail editor Cathaleen Chen, who reported on the independent retail renaissance, and brought this whole package together. Cath, welcome to the debrief.

**Cathaleen Chen** (1:22)
Thanks so much, Sheena. Happy to be here today.

**Sheena Butler-Young** (1:25)
So first, I have to say congrats on this huge, huge project making its debut. I'm sure you're relieved, but we can talk about that later.
Before we get into this whole independent retail renaissance, which you've written about for quite some time, I want to start with the package itself. So BoF has launched The Best Fashion Stores in the World, which is an insider's guide to 65 independent retailers with distinctive edits and experiences. What made now the right time to bring together such a list?

**Cathaleen Chen** (1:52)
Yeah. Thanks so much for the recognition, Sheena. I just wanted to say that it was definitely a huge, huge team effort across multiple departments at BoF. I had the privilege of taking the lead on this one. Yeah, it's been really great. It's an inaugural product for us.
We really felt like it was the right time. There's definitely something in the air, because the New York Times also released an iteration of a project that they did last year that was the best 50 stores in America. In the same week that we released our list, they came out with the best fashion stores in New York City. Obviously, brick and mortar retail is relevant right now. We feel it with just the sources that we talked to. In many ways, I think this is just a response to the e-commerce boom that we saw right after the pandemic. I think it was happening before COVID, but especially during that 2020-2021 period, when we were all cooped up at home, just feverishly shopping online. That was definitely me looking for deals on ForFetch and the RealReal. Those are still really great platforms, but I think that people are just itching for a new mode of shopping. I think people are itching for IRL experiences in general. People want to be out and about and have meaningful connections with their community. Even if it means in these more commerce contexts, it's fun to go into a store and talk to someone.
I went to an outdoor store yesterday, not fashion, but I was buying a pair of binoculars for my parents, and I ended up talking to the sales associate about birding for a really long time and I'm usually not a talker. But I think that there is this sense of just wanting to connect and wanting shopping to feel more personal.
That was the starting point for all of this.

**Sheena Butler-Young** (4:08)
One of the reasons why I expressed so much admiration for you, shepherding this project of putting together a list like this, is because it is a process. It requires a very defined methodology and you and the team involved, really you cut no corners and you were very precise in what you were looking for. Talk to us a little bit about how you decided who would make this list because I believe there was like 300 names sent in. And you can talk about who sent those in and how we found those initial 300

**Cathaleen Chen** (4:38)
Cutting no corners short of BoF sending me to 81 cities across the world. I mean, obviously, that would have been an idea. But we're not in the heyday of journalism anymore where that kind of budgeting is feasible. But obviously, that was a major consideration. We knew we wanted to take a global approach. And from the very beginning, we wanted our methodology to reflect a level of industry recognition. Beyond just consumer interest, which is still a huge factor. We really wanted to recognize the stores that, they don't necessarily have to be famous in the industry, but they're recognized for some kind of innovation, or they are recognized as really amazing partners to brands.