A fine jeweler is moving its flagship location from a downtown Winnetka storefront to Brookfield Properties’ Oakbrook Center, as the mall and the suburb itself are gaining a reputation for courting affluent shoppers and residents.
LANA Jewelry has a presence across the country at Neiman Marcus, Saks Fifth Avenue, Nordstrom, Bergdorf Goodman and will soon launch at Bloomingdale’s. Operating out of these department stores helped founder Lana Bramlette gain insight into the performance of various malls.
“We have all this great data to know which malls and areas are the best performing for us,” she said.
LANA will join the ranks of other high-end brands including jeweler David Yurman in the luxury section of west suburban Oakbrook Center, a longtime goal of the locally based brand.
“It was a dream to be amongst those neighbors; next to a David Yurman and a Gucci and across from a Louis Vuitton,” Bramlette said. “It was time, in essence, for us to take it to the next level. We’ve been working on this deal for almost a year.”
While Chicago’s North Shore suburbs, including Winnetka, have long been home to the region’s most affluent residents, Oak Brook has been luring those residents and businesses, as well.
Last month, an Oak Brook mansion sold for $5.3 million, the highest price achieved for a home sale in the suburb in 16 years.
LANA is not alone in eyeing Oakbrook Center as a top performing mall. Last year, Google chose the mall for its first Midwest retail storefront.
The 3,500-square-foot store was the Silicon Valley giant’s fifth brick-and-mortar location in the U.S. after it opened stores in New York City, California and Boston
And this month, Kim Kardashian’s shapewear brand Skims opened its second Chicago-area location in Oakbrook. The store’s first Chicago store is in the Gold Coast’s high-end shopping district along Oak and Rush streets.
The influx of tenants is the culmination of a nearly-decade long revamp led by Brookfield.
Brookfield acquired the mall in 2018 as part of a $15 billion buyout of GGP and then led a $177 million renovation of the property.
The real estate investing giant took out a $475 million loan on the property in 2020 and then secured a $700 million refinancing in 2023. The refinancing was the second largest-shopping mall deal in the country that year. After closing costs, Brookfield raked in $220 million in equity out of the property.
Prior to the overhaul, the mall had been losing tenants, including Lord & Taylor and Sears.
As a part of the $177 million renovation, Brookfield reworked former department store spaces into smaller storefronts that were later filled by tenants including, L.L. Bean, Life Time Fitness, RH Gallery and Sony Wonderverse.
The mall’s performance improved steadily as a result, with sales topping $1 billion in 2023, according to Fitch Ratings.
Momentum at the Oakbrook Center bucks the trend of suburban shopping malls spiraling into financial distress amid the rise of online shopping. In the Chicago area alone, there are at least five ongoing projects to repurpose former suburban shopping malls into multifamily housing and mixed-use districts.