Design August 24, 2006, 11:14AM EST

Jack's Mixed Bag

Andy Spade's new Soho store — a case study in subversive branding and calculated undesign — unseats all the conventional wisdom surrounding upscale retailing

by Peter Hall

On the walls and shelves of the Jack Spade store on Greene Street in Soho, the branded men's bags and accessories are interspersed with more improbable merchandise: three stuffed white rats, an old Kodak camera, a seemingly huge early Sony Watchman, a collection of miniature Christmas trees sprinkled with fake snow, an Arizona travel sticker, a hunk of coal. Parked outside the store are two heavy vintage Schwinn bicycles, also for sale. It's an inventory that might end up sounding like lyrics from the Tom Waits song "Soldier's Things": "Cuff links and hubcaps/Trophies and paperbacks/It's good transportation/But the brakes aren't so hot."

The 500-square-foot store—recently renovated with the help of architect Steven Sclaroff—is the latest aberration in retailing convention, an experiment in the spirit of Murray Moss's Soho shop or Dave Eggers's 826 Valencia, in San Francisco, a pirate-supply store that doubles as a publishing office and a kids' workshop center. Almost everything in Jack Spade is for sale, but the point is not so much to sell it as to show it, to help create a brand that unseats the conventional wisdom that luxury goods demand an impeccably up-scale retail setting.

Jack Spade is the brainchild and indulgence of Andy Spade, CEO of the expanding Kate Spade empire. A former creative director at ad agency TBWAChiatDay, Andy has been dubbed a "brand visionary" for the extraordinary success of Kate Spade—the company currently grosses more than $200 million a year, with 24 stores worldwide. He and his then partner (now wife), Kate Brosnahan Spade, a former fashion-magazine editor, dreamed up the Kate Spade brand in 1993, based on a simple functional handbag with a distinctive color and fabric and an urbane cachet. Feeling frustrated by his exclusion from the target demographic, Andy came up with his fictional brother, Jack, in 1997, inspired by two of his idols, Jack Kerouac, the writer, and Jack Welch, the former General Electric CEO. The two Jacks represent, as Spade puts it, a complementary balance of art and commerce: "It's a challenge to run a business and do things you like to do. You can't be creative without being solvent."

Selling bags to men is a challenging enterprise, and Spade's approach has been to promote the brand as if it had been around for years, aligning it with workaday classics like military-issue chinos, Levis jeans, and Lacoste shirts. The first Jack Spade bags were made of Waxwear or canvas and were sold on consignment in a hardware store. That it's difficult to imagine a hardware-store customer who would plunk down $400 for a shoulder bag suggests that this was less a sales policy than an approach to building a cult following. When the store opened in 1999 in a space formerly occupied by the UFO Clothing Company, the design team went to some lengths to keep the location incognito. Sclaroff had to persuade Spade that the store needed a sign outside. "Eventually we agreed to make a sign that was two by six inches," Sclaroff says. "It was stolen and never replaced."

When the recent renovation was complete, staffer Robert Chan recalls, it "felt too new and shiny, too clean and precious." Amends were made: Sclaroff found a battered red sofa auctioned by a Pennsylvania firehouse—in, he says, "the perfect state of destruction." It sits center stage patched with duct tape on an oriental rug. Sclaroff adds that Andy Spade's impulse is to keep removing the bags to make room for more bric-a-brac. "Luckily there are people helping him who won't let him do that, but it's a good impulse. There are certainly other retailers who prop heavily—Ralph Lauren comes to mind—but Jack Spade is so not that."

As a brand Jack Spade plays a sophisticated semiotic game.

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