Boutique Soho shoe shop Melissa Shoes is striding from Greene Street to A New Flagship Location On Broadway that’s as visible as its candy-colored PVC footwear.
The trendsetting retailer, popular with celebrities and fashionistas for its recyclable footgear in attention-grabbing styles, signed a lease to take over the former Tommy Hilfiger space at 500 Broadway, sources told The Real Deal.
Representatives for the Sao Paulo-based company and landlord Only Properties declined to comment.
At 4,200 square feet, the new shop will be nearly twice the size of Melissa’s gallery-style store at 102 Greene Street, where the company set up shop in 2012.
Melissa’s is known for high-style collaborations with designers such as the architect Zaha Hadid and famed fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld.
The new space, which has been empty since Tommy Hilfiger left when its lease expired in the summer, is located between Spring and Broome streets next to Bloomingdale’s – a location Soho experts said offers the shoe shop strong co-tenancy.
The terms of the deal were not clear. The asking price for the space had been around $850 per square foot, though sources not involved in the negotiations speculated it was unlikely the lease was signed at such a high price.
Retail asking rents in the neighborhood climbed 4.6 percent last year to an average of $541 per square foot, according to Cushman & Wakefield’s fourth quarter retail report. That was the second biggest jump in the city behind the Flatiron District.
And at 20.7 percent, Soho has the highest availability rate in Manhattan.
The rise in rents has been a double-edged sword. While it creates more availabilities, it can pay off for patient landlords who are willing to wait for a tenant to come along and meet their price.
Melissa’s was about halfway through a 10-year lease on Greene Street, which landlord SL Green bought from Lloyd Goldman’s BLDG Management for $32 million a little more than a year ago.
Retail rents on Greene Street have shot up precipitously in recent years. Thor Equities earlier this year sold a retail condo for twice its 2014 purchase price – and sources said SL Green bought Melissa’s out of the remainder of its lease.
The REIT then put the space on the market and is rumored to have signed Italian luxury retailer Fendi to the property, though the deal couldn’t be independently confirmed.