Backpack brand Herschel Supply opening Soho store

Herschel Supply Co., whose trendy backpacks are ubiquitous in fashionable neighborhoods like Soho, is opening a brick-and-mortar store in the neighborhood.

The Vancouver-based company will open shop next fall at 543 Broadway, where the retailer signed a lease with landlord Aurora Capital Associates.

Herschel took 4,200 square feet on the pedestrian-mobbed stretch of Broadway between Prince and Spring streets where the asking rent on the space was $342 per square foot, according to a spokesperson for Aurora.

Herschel had previously operated a pop-up store in Soho in 2019 nearby at 462 Broadway.

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The deal comes as New York’s long-struggling retail scene is starting to show signs of life.

Asking rents on Manhattan’s 16 top retail corridors showed an increase for the first time since 2016, according to CBRE. Average asking rents across those stretches showed a slight increase of a little more than 2 percent from the second to the third quarter of the year to $607 per square foot, the brokerage’s figures show.

Rents on Broadway in Soho recorded a roughly 4 percent drop during that period to an average of $342 per square foot, but CBRE did note that the stretch showed a dramatic decrease in the number of available spaces.

Availability dropped 44 percent year-over-year to 14 spaces in the third quarter.