For more than 24 years, Arie Assaraf has had his finger on the pulse of international style, making it his mission to bring Canadians up-to-the-minute looks and giving them reason to sartorially celebrate the latest and the greatest in fashion. Today, his four style emporiums, dubbed TNT – which stands for "The New Trend"– are deemed urban style meccas by his loyal clientele. These tony boutiques – three in Toronto and one in Montreal – are shops where personal service rules supreme. Assaraf regards his staff not as salespeople but as "professional stylists" who are passionate about wardrobe building. But these are both heady and perilous times in retail, and Assaraf, who emigrated to Toronto from Israel to realize his dreams, makes no bones about the fact that he'll have to step up his game and keep a sharper focus than ever in order to maintain his unique edge in this increasingly crowded arena. Accordingly, later this fall, he's opening another new frock shop especially dedicated to event dressing. Assaraf recently took time out from showroom hopping in New York to talk about his retail strategy, getting up close and personal with his clients, and why he's on a mission to seek out new labels.
With such a rapidly evolving retail landscape, you must really be on your toes these days. What's your strategy going forward?
I'm shifting a little bit with everything that's going on in New York, obviously because the dollar makes such a big difference now. With the state of our dollar, plus the duties that we're paying, our costs are about 50-per-cent higher than the States. And what makes it really difficult is that when you deal with brands like Helmut Lang, Rag & Bone, Theory… the prices are just getting too high. And we were depending on a lot of those big American anchor brands. So about six months ago I shifted totally. These big brands were no longer our anchors, and we started finding some new lines. We still work with the big American brands but we're buying a little bit less. We're expanding more to Europe, and I'm doing lots of research in Milan. We're bringing in new brands from London and Australia. It's all very exciting. But it seems that everybody is elevating themselves. They all understand now that things need to change. They can't just keep on recycling bestsellers.
It's exciting to think about this new vision that we're going to be offered in Canada.
Well, I look at my customer, and my customer is 90-per-cent local. My customer is not a tourist. I'm going back into the DNA of clothing. It's all about dressing a woman you know, and it's all about customer service and shopping for the customer. I'm also getting into more dresses. We're opening an event-dressing store later this fall. I think that there is a big movement toward this and I'd like to actually make it an anchor. Before, it all revolved around denim and the street and the androgynous look. We still have to do that, but now we're bringing other elements into what we offer. We're dressing all kinds of women, and I love that. We're mixing the clothing up, and that's what I love the most.
The retail landscape is getting so crowded, but you're looking at it as a wonderful challenge and a springboard to whole new possibilities.
Oh, absolutely! I mean, I've been doing that for 20 years. For me, this new time is a very difficult time, but we're always trying to innovate. This is what really makes me love this business – the challenge of making it different. With Nordstrom and Saks coming in, unfortunately we cannot compete with them with certain brands. But that's why I'm curating a whole different vision. We're always going to try to be unique, and we're always going to be all about the service. People are telling me it's going to be very crowded, so I say, "Yeah, and they're all going to make me look great, so it's all good." If it's going to be crowded, we need to shine. I'm going to do whatever it takes, you know, because we are a local retailer and we're hands-on. A department store cannot do what a boutique can do because they have their own way of doing things. And at the end of the day, when they ask me, "Arie, who's going to be your competition?" I say, "I'm not in the Olympics! There's no competition. I'm not running to get a gold medal." Basically, we have a woman who has a closet and we all need to be in her closet.
You get to see it all, and pick what you believe your customer is going to want. But how hard is it to maintain that focus when there's so much coming at you?
I know exactly who our customer is. Andwe also buy differently. The unique thing with us is that because I see about 350 brands, I see the whole closet, I see everything that's available. There are not too many buyers today who buy or even see all these categories. In a department store, there is a designer buyer, a contemporary buyer, a denim buyer, a dress buyer… and they are not connected. They don't see what everybody's buying. I see everything and I buy everything. So, I look at things with a different eye. And I choose it very differently. I have to be honest with you, 2014 was very stale. Nothing was inspiring – 2014 was a really slack year in fashion as far as I'm concerned. I knew we had to change our buying direction, and for that, you need to do research, travel, go to showrooms. You need to go see many, many designers. Now, it's the talented small designers I love the most.
What would you suggest to young Canadian designers behind the brands that are trying to get off the ground here. What hope can you give them?
Talent is talent, but at the end of the day, if they do not have the infrastructure behind them, unfortunately, there's nowhere to go. There's so much talent out there, but they don't have the money behind them, and they're not going to be able to do what they need to do. The people who actually have some money and some direction behind them are doing okay. But it's not easy for Canadian designers to actually make it in Canada, because it's a very limited business with the retailers. It's also important to understand that it's not just what's happening in your backyard. You need to see what's happening in the world, what's going on in China, in Russia, in Europe. We need to understand the shift of fashion.