Browns East closes with Brook Street in West End now the main focus

By

Sandra Halliday

Published
Sep 29, 2022

Browns has closed its much-talked-about Browns East branch on Club Row in Shoreditch with the luxury fashion retailer saying that the branch had originally been planned as a pop-up five years ago, but “was so successful that we stayed the course for longer than planned”.

A pop-up it may have been, but it was a more heavily invested one than many pop-ups and it has made an impact in recent years with a variety of big and emerging-name launches and experiences.

The company's flagship on Brook Street in London's West End remains its primary London destination and Browns said that Brook Street is its “forever home”. 

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The retailer opened on Club Row in autumn 2017 at which time its main branch was its original home on London’s South Molton Street. That had been its location for decades, but it had its limitations due to the large number of relatively small rooms that made up the space.

Shoreditch, by contrast, was a spacious, open-plan location that provided a completely different experience.

But it’s unsurprising that the retailer’s move in 2021 to an impressive — and larger — store on Brook Street, just around the corner from New Bond Street, would see this being the primary focus for the Farfetch-owned business. 

The West End and Knightsbridge are the two main luxury-focused retail neighbourhoods in London and despite Shoreditch’s transformation in recent years, it’s known more for its concentration of edgy brands than its focus on ultra-luxury.

Others have tried multi brand luxury concepts in areas of London beyond the West End and Knightsbridge. But as Jigsaw-owned The Shop at Bluebird showed when it moved from Chelsea to Covent Garden, making a go of it isn’t easy. It’s quite a challenge to make multibrand luxury work outside of the traditional hotspots and The Shop at Bluebird closed in January 2020.