Serapian arriving stateside

Italian handbag lovers rejoice. Serapian is coming stateside after a long and successful 70 years in Milan. The brand has signed an LLC partnership that will allow them to launch retail, e-commerce, and wholesale operations stateside. Phase one of their endeavor will be a men’s wholesale partnership with iconic department store Barney’s New York.

Styles are already available in eight of the department store’s doors, as well as barneys.com. Phase two of their endeavor includes opening Serapian’s first stand alone store at 204 North Rodeo Drive next month. The space is only 900 square feet, but, with retail spaces making the shift toward smaller more intimate spaces Serapian is poised to be ahead of the curve. The store is expected to open within the next few weeks, as Women’s Wear Daily has reported it should be open around mid-April.

While Serapian bags aren’t quite a household name yet the artists behind these bags are not your normal artists. The brand has declined to state some of the brands that their artists have designed for, but, according to Giovanni Nodari, Serapian’s marketing manager, two French fashion houses and two Italian fashion houses have employed their artists. Serapian, which is presided over by Arda Serapian, son of the founders Stefano Serapian and Gina Flori, employs over 100 artists to help create the bags.

Serapian begins expanding in the U.S.

What makes them unique is they do everything themselves. This is what helps keep their prices lower than a lot of other Made in Italy brands, with the average women’s bag ranging in price from 600 dollars to 3,000 dollars, while the average men’s bag can range from 395 dollars to 2500 dollars. Serapian does not follow the usual creative director model either. Instead, their designs are picked from approximately 6,000 handbag blueprints designed by Stefano Serapian himself.

“Mr. Serapian was a real designer,” Nodari said to Women’s Wear Daily. “He left us thousands of designs in our archives. We can go on for years using these original designs by the founder, it’s something we can study every season.”

With the arrival of their new Rodeo Drive location this will bring Serapian to a grand total of 9 brick-and-mortar retail locations, with other stores located in major cities such as Hong Kong, Rome, and Seoul. New York City is being eyed for their next U.S. location, and it’s no secret that you can always find retail space somewhere in New York City, so, it won’t be long before Serapian could land on the East Coast. They currently have their sights set on Madison Avenue, home to the best designer boutiques the East Coast has to offer.

While Serapian hasn’t set any sales goals for themselves because they’d prefer to wait and see how their first U.S. location is received, with prime retail space like Rodeo Drive they should find themselves quite pleased. They are a much welcome addition to the U.S. luxury retail landscape. Of course, competition for luxury handbags just got a little tougher, but, that’s only to be expected.