Invitation to a Showdown

BAGS AS BADGE The affections of shoppers face a test as Scoop — guided by its co-founder Stefani Greenfield — and a rival, Intermix, expand and refurbish locations.

By ERIC WILSON
Published: December 28, 2006


TARYNNE GOLDENBERG, 22, is the kind of customer Stefani Greenfield loves. Ms. Goldenberg, an associate art director for a publishing company in Westchester County, shops three times a week, mostly at Scoop, the popular chain of boutiques started by Ms. Greenfield 10 years ago.

(Tony Cenicola/The New York Times) Stefani Greenfield, co-founder of Scoop.

“I bought this at Scoop,” said Ms. Goldenberg, who wore a tweed Alice + Olivia bomber jacket. “And I love it.”

The only problem this day was that Ms. Goldenberg was stepping out of Intermix, a competing store on Prince Street in SoHo, which opened last year a block away from the Scoop flagship on Broadway. Ms. Goldenberg said she shops at both stores, which are facing off like prize fighters to stock the closets of fashion-obsessed consumers. Both carry skinny jeans from Citizens of Humanity and vivid print dresses from Diane Von Furstenberg and Matthew Williamson, Theory sweaters and Michael Kors espadrilles.

“They’re pretty much interchangeable,” Ms. Goldenberg said. “They have a lot of the same things.”

In Manhattan, where Scoop has three locations and Intermix five, the rivalry is becoming more visible as the two try to reach even more young urban women who are able to afford luxury goods, at least occasionally.

Both Scoop and Intermix are enormously successful — sales per square foot, the retail industry yardstick, average $1,800 at Scoop and $2,000 at Intermix, according to the companies. Each has grown from a handful of employees to about 350 today. Scoop has 11 stores in 9 cities and Intermix has 15 in 11 cities, overlapping in Manhattan, Miami, Las Vegas, Dallas and two upscale enclaves of Long Island.

In its latest salvo, Scoop plans to open its largest store of all, called Mega Scoop, at the end of January in a 10,000-square-foot space at 473-475 Broadway. Not to be outmaneuvered, Intermix plans, around the same time, to triple the size of its most profitable location, on Madison Avenue at 77th Street, to 5,000 square feet.

“We need a home to show the world who we really are,” said Ms. Greenfield, discussing plans for Mega Scoop last week. She is the public face that most customers associate with the brand, often seen in the stores or talking about trends on the “Today” show.

“This is the first time we will be showing women’s, men’s, kid’s, jewelry and fragrance under one roof,” she added. “This is the world of Scoop.”

In the Scoop offices, above the new store on Broadway, Ms. Greenfield, 39, and her business partner, Uzi Ben-Abraham, described how Scoop was founded, and became a quick success, at a moment when many young women began putting together wardrobes that emphasized individual choices rather than pieces from one designer (usually Gucci or Prada) head to toe.

Scoop’s identity was built on mixing items from various designers, both high and low, on the same racks and displays, rather than segregating them by label in the traditional department store model.

Hiroko Masuike for The New York Times TASTE MAKERS The staff at Scoop on Washington Street (from left to right), Ashley Sugarman, Danielle Kern, Sabine LeGuyader and Valeria Fernandez.

Ms. Greenfield, a Manhattan native, began her dream of building “the ultimate closet,” as she describes Scoop, at an early age. On school breaks, she worked at a Madison Avenue boutique so she could shop at Fiorucci, then cause a stir at a club like Area in silver sparkle shoes worn with parachute pants. When her grandmother gave her money for a prom dress at Bergdorf Goodman, she returned with a $5 gown from Andy’s Chee-Pees instead.

“I’m a hippie in Manolo Blahniks,” she said.

Ms. Greenfield, now eight months pregnant with her first child, seems little given to moments of calm reflection. In her 20s, she had raced up the sales ranks of Donna Karan and was recruited by Esprit, from which she was fired. While Rollerblading in Union Square a few months later, she came up with the idea for Scoop. At dinner one night with Mr. Ben-Abraham at Raoul’s in SoHo, they sealed a deal on a napkin, and five months later they had a store.

Two decades earlier, Mr. Ben-Abraham had moved to New York from Israel and got a job selling men’s wear on 34th Street. Within a year, he had opened Renaissance on Broadway and Houston Street, which sold street brands, and later, Atrium at Broadway and Bleecker Street, where he featured department store labels like DKNY, Ralph Lauren and Tommy Hilfiger. He met Ms. Greenfield when she was a sales manager for DKNY.

Ms. Greenfield no longer knows all the employees in her stores, although she reviews their photographs before visits, and every Monday morning she knows what sold at the highest profit the week before. When she opened a store in East Hampton in 1998, Ms. Greenfield’s friends were surprised to find her there every day.

“I’m going to be sitting on a beach when there’s a store that does 80 percent of its business in three months of a year?” she asked.

“We were total mavericks when we started out,” Ms. Greenfield said. “We put Michael Kors in a store with Dollhouse flare pants. If I come down here and I don’t see someone with a Scoop bag within five blocks, my heart still starts to palpitate.”

Khajak Keledjian, the chief executive of Intermix, was 19 and a student at New York University when the first Intermix store opened in the Flatiron district in 1993, predating Scoop by about three years. Mr. Keledjian had worked for Botticelli, having arrived in New York from Beirut, Lebanon, when he was 14. He lived with an older brother, Haro, who became his partner in Intermix.

“The mentality was not to go into a showroom and do a complete buy of one designer,” said Mr. Keledjian, now 33. “It was picking a few pieces from each designer. If you walk into an Intermix store, in 10 minutes you’ll get an overall idea of what are the trends, the colors and the lifestyles of a season. Here it’s all together.”

Hiroko Masuike for The New York Times Apparell at Scoop.

Even though Intermix opened earlier than Scoop, with a similar concept, it was Scoop that initially grabbed the higher profile, in part by hiring a publicity firm that got Ms. Greenfield into magazines and on television with her focus on “the Scoop girl.” She made Scoop a brand, with its own fragrance and clothes. Next summer she plans to sell a Scoop line on HSN.

The gauntlet has been thrown, despite a light veil of amusement on either side.

“We’ve built Scoop into a lifestyle, not just little boutiques,” Mr. Ben-Abraham said.

Mr. Keledjian’s retort was no less barbed. “We’re more novel and special, and the product itself is more interesting,” he said. “It’s a much easier concept than having a basic store where they sell the same four-ply cashmere sweaters every year.”

Even as they plan significant expansions, Scoop and Intermix are also facing competition from the offshoots of luxury retailers pursuing youthful customers, including Barneys New York, which is opening Co-Op stores around the country, and Neiman Marcus, which has a new contemporary store called Cusp.

The owners of Scoop and Intermix insist they do not view their dual expansions as outside observers may — that is, a retail battle for a generation of consumers perhaps overly informed by “Sex and the City,” for whom Bleecker Street (Intermix) and the meatpacking district (Scoop) are more familiar terrain than Rodeo Drive. (Neither is in Los Angeles anyway.)

Nevertheless, the ambitious plans and the loyalty displayed by some shoppers to a Scoop or an Intermix would suggest a wardrobe walk-off is at hand.

The verdicts among customers are not conclusive. Regarding Scoop, some cited exemplary customer service, its prestige as a cool store and more affordable items than they found at Intermix, but complaints included a lack of small sizes and too much similar merchandise.

Intermix was said to have more options and new designer names, but some customers found it cluttered and difficult to shop in the winding racks.

“It’s eclectic,” said Christine Conlon, 40, a technical designer for a fashion company, who was shopping at the Prince Street Intermix. “They have a lot of current, in-style, high-end designers in one spot. At department stores you have to look everywhere.”

Hiroko Masuike for The New York Times Intermix on Prince Street, a block from a Scoop.

Ms. Conlon, who has lived in New York for 18 years, said she had never heard of Scoop.

“Intermix is for younger customers,” said Hanna Borg, 21, visiting New York from Iceland this week. “Scoop is for someone just a little older.”

In fashion speak, the Carrie Bradshaws of the world — flamboyant and label-conscious — shop at Intermix, while the Mirandas prefer Scoop, with its high-low individuality wrapped in a generic cashmere hoodie.

Ms. Greenfield said she believes there is room for everyone.