A Big Shoe Store, With Bigger Goals

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The New York Sun

Acrobats in body stockings and brand-new shoes twisted in the tall windows of a new boutique in SoHo last week. Inside Té Casan’s 7,500-square-foot flagship store, hundreds of people enjoyed a cocktail party hosted by bold-face names including Amy Sacco, Lucy Sykes, and Zani Gugelmann. Yet in the midst of all this revelry, some partygoers were focused on shopping.

They had good reason to act quickly. Té Casan shoes are produced in limited-edition batches. For example, only 30 pairs of green suede high-heeled sandals will be produced for each size. That means the store’s offerings will change at least weekly. Most shoes are priced between $250 and $350, putting them above DSW and David Z’s, but well below the likes of Manolo Blahnik and Christian Louboutin.

The boutique, which advertises itself as the biggest shoe store in Manhattan, features shoes on three floors, a downstairs tea shop, and a series of small huts where women can try on shoes in privacy. The space is broken into seven sections, each dominated by large photographic portraits of a different shoe designer.

That’s part of the store’s mission to personalize the shopping experience. At Té Casan, you are not just buying that pair of green sandals, you are buying the aesthetic of the shoe’s designer, Manuela Filipovic. On the company’s Web site, tecasan.com, each designer provides a mood-setting quote to accompany their shoes. Ms. Filipovic’s reads: “I want to wear an evening gown and high heels to walk my dog, with my cigarette. Why don’t I do this? What is it that holds us back? Regret? The worst is not to have done what I wanted with my life.”

According to the company’s creative director, Asil Attar, “The entire concept was wanting to allow the customers to connect on a very personal and emotional level with the designers.”

In choosing the featured designers, Ms. Attar said she had certain categories of design she wanted to fulfill, and that each designer’s pieces had to work together. She interviewed 55 designers before settling on the final team of seven.

“We use Té Casan as a melting pot for design, talent, and definitely for culture,” she said, and indeed, Ms. Attar is proud of her team’s diversity. “With Gianluca [Soldi], you can see he’s Italian, designing elegant, sophisticated, glamorous, beautiful, sexy shoes. You look at his image and you can definitely identify. You get to identify with the designer’s personality.”

Do New Yorkers care that the woman who designed their lilac boots is, in the case of Zoe Lee, Japanese-Canadian? Perhaps, although a better clue to her style is probably her previous work for Vivienne Westwood. But it doesn’t hurt, in the heat of the to-buy-or-not-tobuy moment, that Ms. Lee does seem quite stylish.

Té Casan is thinking even bigger than a single brand-new boutique. “It’s global domination, absolutely,” Ms. Attar said. “We want to expand in all the major cities in the U.S. and also globally.” In September of next year the company plans to open a store in either Las Vegas or Miami, and other outlets will follow.Té Casan’s global ambitions are indicated by its offices in Spain, Switzerland, and New York.

In the meantime, Ms. Attar wants the brand to play a role in moving its designers on to bigger and better appointments. “They will definitely rotate out, but there’s not a specific time frame. They’ll be noticed and move out, and be replaced by the next generation,”she said.”Usually designers are sitting in the office and their talent is unrecognized. We want to propel them to stardom.”


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