Dive Brief:
- Apparel brand Buck Mason on Saturday opened its second retail store in Chicago located at 3438 North Southport Avenue in the city’s Lakeview area, according to details emailed to Retail Dive.
- The new 2,000-square-foot store offers the brand’s full collection of products, which include Los Angeles-made T-shirts, elevated sweats, leather jackets and Japanese denim jeans.
- The new Chicago store marks the Los Angeles-based clothing company’s 32nd retail location as the brand plans for more stores.
Dive Insight:
Buck Mason is continuing to build out its brick-and-mortar footprint.
The brand opened its first location in Chicago in March of 2023 in the Lincoln Park area. That location measures about half the size of the new Southport store.
Similar to Los Angeles and New York, Chicago continues to be a desirable city for DTC brands to open brick-and-mortar stores. Wilson Sporting Goods opened two stores in Chicago in 2023, while Beyond Yoga, a Levi Strauss-owned brand, opened its first studio outside of California in Chicago in November.
“We love the neighborhood,” Erik Allen Ford, co-founder of Buck Mason, said in an email. “We really fell in love with the space though. Chicago brick walls, and original hardwood floors, it was just an idyllic storefront.”
Founded in 2013 by Ford and Sasha Koehn, the DTC brand opened its first store in 2015 on Abbot Kinney in the Venice area of Los Angeles. As of today, the company has stores in California, Arizona, Colorado, Washington, Texas, Tennessee, Georgia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, New York, Massachusetts and Washington, D.C.
The brand continues to see opportunity in expanding its physical footprint.
“We’re going to keep expanding where it makes sense — making our mark even bigger in places we’ve already established, and branching out to new markets that feel like a perfect fit, both in the numbers and the local vibe. The most important thing for us is giving our guests the full experience wherever they are,” Koehn said in an email.
Buck Mason focuses on men’s and women’s lifestyle apparel, with men’s making up about 70% of Buck Mason’s inventory, per the company. The company has also collaborated with such brands as Eddie Bauer, J. Mueser and Padmore & Barnes on collections.
A Global Data study published in December found that an increasing number of DTC companies are adopting hybrid distribution models that include pop-up stores, permanent locations, wholesale partners and their own websites in order to meet customers where they shop.