Todd Snyder to open 2nd store at old J.Crew Liquor Store

Todd Snyder is heading to TriBeCa. The CFDA Award-winning designer confirmed to WWD that his label will open its second New York City store at 237 West Broadway in TriBeCa in the former J. Crew Liquor Store space. 

Snyder in 2008 played an integral role in J. Crew taking over the space, which was formerly an alcohol purveyor. The company transformed the aging storefront into a downtown men’s fashion destination with a rustic look and a vintage charm, and Snyder, who was J. Crew’s senior vice president of men’s wear at the time, was part of the project every step of the way.

Snyder worked with Andy Spade and then-chief executive officer Mickey Drexler to create the men’s emporium that also served as the introduction of the brand’s Ludlow suit style, which remains among its best-selling models today. 

“This space holds a lot of history for me and I can’t wait to get back to my roots,” Snyder said. “When we first launched the Liquor Store, I wanted to create a new retail experience and since then, I’ve been able to do that with my own brand. 

Now there’s a fresh opportunity to reimagine the location where it all started.” Snyder worked with his parent company, American Eagle Outfitters, which purchased his business in fall 2015 for $11 million, on securing the lease, he said. “AEO has given us the green light and continues to give us incredible support,” Snyder said. 

He founded his namesake label in 2011, and soon after opened a stand-alone pop-up store in NoLIta with Champion for their successful collaboration collection, as well as Townhouse and Library concept stores in Tokyo and Osaka, respectively.

In 2016, after the AEO purchase, he opened his label’s first-ever American flagship in 2016 at Madison Square Park in New York City. “The store on Madison Park is doing great and we’ve been looking for what makes sense in retail and the Liquor Store fell in our laps,” 

he said. “I guess it’s kismet.” Snyder said the Liquor Store location is “going to be an upgrade of what it was before.” We just got the lease confirmed, so I’m spending the next few months ideating how to make the Liquor Store a unique space for our brand, but no plans have been finalized yet.” 

The store is expected to open in early fall. When the Liquor Store opened, J. Crew was at its peak and the store set a new standard for men’s wear specialty retailing as one of the first experiential retail stores with its heritage-heavy clubby interior and third-party brands, including Red Wing shoes and Thomas Mason shirts.

text by wwd


J.Crew Liquor Store;

In 2008, J.Crew turned a former bar in Tribeca into a clubby boutique: the Liquor Store. The idea was to teach a new group of increasingly style-conscious men that J.Crew could index downtown cool, rather than zippy prep. That audience, it turned out, was hungry. I was, at least, and it seemed I wasn't alone: even in those recession years, the store exceeded expectations almost instantaneously. The designer Todd Snyder was in charge of menswear at the time, and—along with branding whiz Andy Spade and J.Crew chairman Mickey Drexler—helped open the shop. He knew it was going to work, he told me last year, “but I had no idea how great it was going to be. That store, alone, did almost as much business as the store on 5th Avenue.”

But the Liquor Store wasn’t just about improving business. It was about performing a kind of profit-minded sacred duty, revitalizing the moribund J.Crew while teaching a generation of men how to dress better. The store launched in tandem with J.Crew’s Ludlow suit (initially named the Tribeca, before an objection from the legal department), which shortly took over the rest of the city. Snyder left in 2008, after opening the store, and was replaced by Frank Muytjens, who doubled down on J.Crew’s pivot: the brand started showing men’s at New York Fashion Week.

Soon the Liquor Store look was inescapable. “Am I bugging or did a whole lotta dudes in New York suddenly learn how to dress?” wondered Mary HK Choi. She was not bugging. This was J.Crew at work. “Everyone’s watch is now the old timey Timex from J.Crew for $150 so yeah, 360 IDK,” she wrote. A 2011 Observer story noted the Ludlow’s popularity among media types.

This was the Liquor Store in rare form: the shop was an early entrant into the Collaboration Wars, selling Red Wings and Aldens and Thomas Mason shirts and, yes, Timex watches. But the shop was offering more than just the goods. It gave guys a way of thinking about clothes and the values they might embody (American manufacturing! British heritage!). And it did it all at a decidedly non-designer price point.

But 2019 is not 2012, and J.Crew’s fortunes have cratered in that span. Muytjens left the company in 2017. His replacement, Somsack Sikhounmuong, left shortly thereafter, and Drexler exited early this year. A new CEO, Jim Brett, shifted the brand away from the trend-adjacent Liquor Store approach, and J.Crew announced a slight year-over-year sales bump in the brand’s most recent earnings report—which came out a few days after Brett, too, announced his departure.

I heard the Liquor Store had closed late last year, too, and mourned it briefly at my desk. It wasn’t a surprise, necessarily. Menswear had moved on. Direct-to-consumer brands without Tribeca store leases were chipping away at J.Crew’s position as the normal-dude-approved retailer, while men more broadly got deeper into fashion as J.Crew was easing out of it.

The reality was slightly more complicated. The Liquor Store is still open on West Broadway, but closing at the end of March. On a recent weekend afternoon, I was the only shopper in the store. (In fairness, two guys exited as I was walking in.) Three staffers waited attentively—and one, a college student, asked about GQ’s internship program. Executives aren’t the only J.Crew employees who have to worry about an exit strategy.

The store felt like a weird simulacra of itself. It looked like I remembered, but the charge that accompanies a genuine shopping experience (This might be the place!) was lost. It was as if the store knew that the fashion-conscious men of New York City were no longer interested.

text by GQ


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