Celebrated retailer opens first Las Vegas boutique
By Susan Stapleton
Chris Fiore likes to say it only took Henri Bendel 117 years to come to Las Vegas. The president of the upscale women’s store was on hand at the opening of the Fashion Show
boutique, a 2,200-square-foot bonbon box filled with handbags, jewelry and beauty products and wrapped in the retailer’s trademark brown and white stripes.
“We haven’t really been in the mall store, specialty store arena, for more than four years,” Fiore said. “We wanted to get it right before we got to Vegas. We just wanted to fine-tune the assortment, fine-tune the styling, the selection, the manufacturing process, the retail structure, so that when we got to Vegas we had our act together. And we feel we did. The customer will be the judge of that.”
Henri Bendel in Vegas comes from New York City and was the first luxury retailer with an Upper Fifth Avenue address to hold semi-annual sales and stage fashion shows. The fashion-forward retailer is credited with bringing Coco Chanel to the United States and hiring Andy Warhol as an in-house illustrator.
Inside, the boutique is home to Henri Bendel’s own collection of goods. “This represents everything we have that we design. We design everything ourselves,” Fiore said. “We choose the hardware. We choose the leather. And we build the product right from the bottom up. So every piece of jewelry, every gift, every accessory is proprietary to us.”
The priciest handbag rings in at $650. The high-end jewelry fetches $450 at most. In fact, the highest-priced item in the store is $7,500, a jewelry trunk hand-made in Morocco.
“Whether it’s this bag for $168 or it’s a $600 satchel, I think there’s something here for every woman who walks in, regardless of how old she is,” Fiore said.
Next up is a second Vegas location, scheduled to open Nov. 19 at The Forum Shops at Caesars.
Fashion Show
11 a.m.-7 p.m. Sun., 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Mon.-Sat., 3200 Las Vegas Blvd. S. 702.836.9829
