The Shophound

SCENTS IN SPACE: ODIN Creates A Pop-Up Environment For Its Fragrances

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We weren't quite sure what to expect when we were invited down to Odin New York, one of our favorite stores in the East Village (or anywhere, really), to preview a special pop-up store for Odin's Fragrance and Home Fragrance lines in the concept shop next to the mini-chain's original East 11th Street store. After all, don't they sell those things at Odin all the time anyway?

When The Shophound got down there yesterday evening, we immediately understood the point of the whole venture as we encountered a striking environment inside the tiny retail space. Working with the Odin team, the innovative design firm, Snarkitecture created a deceptively expansive installation using plaster casts of the brand's fragrance bottles precisely positioned and suspended to form a pristine and unexpectedly serene setting for the product lines (pictured above). We also got a chance to finally meet Eddy Chai, one of Odin's co-founders, and discovered that their fragrance partner is a former co-worker of ours from way back when The Shophound was just a fledgling sales associate.

The installation opens to the public today, May 1st, and will remain for six weeks. The first 50 customers who make a purchase from the award winning fragrance collection during the first week of the concept shop with receive a plaster cast bottle as an artifact from the shop (which also happens to make an excellent if quirky paperweight). The next week, customers will have to settle for an Odin New York x Snarkitecture tote bag decorated with a rendering of the installation.

Odin New York Fragrance x Snarkitecture Pop-Up 330 East 11th Street Between First & Second Avenues, East Village

Boutique Expansion: Odin Takes A Crosstown Trip

Call it the Little East Village Boutique that could.
Odin, the 5-year-old East 11^th Street men's shop that has helped launch and showcase designers like Robert Geller, Tim Hamilton and Engineered Garments to name just a few, will be adding another location, its third, as just one of its upcoming projects. Owners Eddy Chai and Paul Birardi will be taking over the Oliver Spencer Boutique on Greenwich Street in the West Village. Spencer will be moving East to take over the space occupied by Den, Odin's revolving concept space next door, while the Den concept will be absorbed into the Odin flagship on Lafayette Street in SoHo.
If that little game of musical stores isn't enough, Chai and Birardi are working with Duckie Brown designers Daniel Silver and Steven Cox to create a contemporary priced classic collection called Edward which, naturally, will launch exclusively in Odin's stores.
Having thoroughly covered the territory below 14^th Street, could Odin's next stop be uptown?
Odin Owners Continue to Expand Their Reach (WWD)

Departures: Happy Trails To Howdy Do

This past weekend saw the passing of anther iconic East Village store. Howdy Do was a compact corner of East 7^th Street, but its roots ran back to the freewheeling pre-gentrified days of the early '90s when the neighborhood was more drag bar than coffee bar. The brainchild of Michael Torres and Ryan Lance and their love of pop culture in its myriad forms, Howdy Do became a cherished headquarters for the media effluvia and gaudy baubles known as kitsch. The duo built their reputations as connoisseurs of collectibles at the forefront of what would become a national obsession, offering forgotten treasures like Blythe dolls, vintage books and accessories and all manner of promotional tie in products from long forgotten movies and TV shows. Looking for an original Cher doll? Here was your first stop.
After an all too familiar story of dodgy landlords and staggering rent hikes, Torres and Lance weighed their options and decided the time was right to take a break from retail life.
"We had other opportunities in the neighborhood to move the store," Torres told us last Saturday as the last of Howdy Do's goods and fixtures were being sold, and the shop was being dismantled. "We felt like this was a good time to regroup and return in a new way." The team promises to bring Howdy Do back in a new form, perhaps as a showroom catering more to stylists, designers and special customers or as whatever happens to feels right for the times.
The pair are sanguine about the inevitability of change, recalling how neighborhood regulars were rattled when they first opened in place of the popular Egg Store. "People would line up for fresh eggs every Tuesday, but we didn't push them out," they told us. In fact, the pair acquired the lease from another store whose plans fell through before it opened. Howdy Do thrived until the popularity of eBay, the changing neighborhood, and of course, the economy slowed business.
Lance and Torres will use the break to work on long postponed projects like a photo book chronicling their experiences as their nightlife alter egos Brandy Wine and Brenda A. Go-Go, regulars at the Marc Jacobs show and glamorous events all over town. Then there are the hours and hours of their hilarious, beloved and frequently tawdry Public Access television show On Patrol that chronicled a particularly vibrant moment in New York's club and fashion culture and is waiting to be repackaged for new eyes.
While Lance and Torres are full of plans for the future, nobody is quite sure what will take the newly vacant space. For East 7^th Street, however, the loss will be another symbol of an especially vivid time in the East Village's bohemian heritage.
Brandy Wine and Brenda A. Go-Go Are On Patrol (Official Site)

Renovations & Upgrades: Kiehl's Gets An East Village Upgrade

Back in the '90s, when it was still a family owned cult cosmetics brand, Kiehl's was famous for its no -nonsense packaging, late deliveries, scarcity of product and its main East Village headquarters at 13^th Street and Third Avenue dating from the mid 19^th century, where customers were encouraged to take an abundance of free samples to try at home before making any purchases.
Since the Morse family sold the company to L'Oreal in 2000, deliveries have improved, distribution has broadened, and there are now 33 freestanding stores, but the Third Avenue home is still a destination for the faithful, and now it has been given a facelift as well as exclusive products that will sold nowhere else.
“This store is our Graceland — the ultimate Kiehl’s store,” Kiehl’s president Chris Salgardo tells WWD, “We wanted people to leave here with special merchandise and a feeling that they’d been on a journey with us.”
New additions include a "gifting bar" elaborately carved with a subtly stylized skull pattern, which customizes gifts with special packaging and wrappings. Popular products are also available with exclusive packaging designed by an eclectic group celebrities including Erykah Badu and Adrian Grenier. There's logo gear as well for the faithful making pilgrimages for far and wide including a $90 bathrobe found only at the store. If this all sounds a little too slick for the hometown favorite, be comforted that teaching skeleton remains on display.
Kiehl’s Spiffs Up Flagship (WWD)

Cintra Wilson Goes Shopping:I'll Try Anything Edition

Today's Critical Shopper, Cintra Wilson gets extra points for going waaay off the beaten path in Today's Thursday Styles. Today's featured boutique is Enchantments, the East Village destination for magicks of all sorts (well, not all sorts. The store pointedly eschews those of the Black variety).
La Cintra's claws remain conspicuously retracted this week, and instead she mostly recounts stories of ordinary shoppers whose lives have been altered with a little help from a potion or two. Apparently, when times get tough, people will turn to all kinds avenues that would remain otherwise unexplored.

Another friend of ours, an actress in her 50s, bought a candle “dressed” to assuage her anxiety about a big acting gig, which she landed. (She soon became the muse of a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, earned several film roles and was finally able to quit her day job. Coincidence?)

Sounds good to us. where do we sign up?
Critical Shopper | Enchantments: Secrets Only Your Witch Would Know
Enchantments 424 East Ninth Street between First Avenue and Avenue A, East Village

Clearance Alert:Den Converts To An Odin Outlet...Get It While It Lasts

Pop-up specialist Den has made itself useful while it waits for its next occupant by clearing out excess stock from sibling stores Odin and Pas de Deux.
Those of you who are familiar with Den know that it's a pretty tiny space, so it gets crowded when even four or five people enter, but once inside, the place is busting with goods from Odin's usual roster of designers which includes labels like Rag & Bone, Tim Hamilton and Robert Geller. Like all clearance sales, it's hit or miss depending on your size, but prices generally looked to run about 75% off or more which is a good deal by anybody's standards. That means a Cheap Monday coat was a whopping $20 over the weekend, and premium denim from Rag & Bone and Kicking Mule Workshop was down to $49 from their usual $200+ levels. We also saw Y-3 sneakers and lots of Spring/Summer goods that were so cheap it would be worth buying early for next year or maybe your sunny Winter vacation. Since Pas De Deux only just opened, there is mostly menswear here, but there are a few women's items kicking around, and some tiny men's sizes left that might be more suitable for women anyway (like a big stack of Cheap Monday Jeans, for example).
We have no end date for this sale, but we know they have to get the space ready for its next pop-up, Richard Chai (who just happens to be Odin co-owner Eddy Chai's brother).
Den hosts Odin's Clearance Sale 333 East 11^th Street between 1^st & 2^nd Avenues, East Village

East Village Empire Building:Odin Expands Once MoreWith Pas De Deux For Ladies

There are two ways to expand your store when the space next door becomes available.
One (the conventional method) is to simply knock down the walls and make the place bigger. The other, which is the method the folks behind Odin on East 11th Street, Eddy Chai and Paul Birardi, have chosen, is to open another store with different but related focus.
Last year we were treated to the opening of Den, which rotates a single label every couple of  months, showcasing new brands and favorites from Odin's vendor list, and now, on the other side of the father ship, Pas De Deux, a women's counterpart, has made its début, ready to take on the powerful troika of Scoop, Intermix & Big Drop, and making a mini-retail empire in the East Village.
Long and narrow, like its progenitor, The new store has its own distinct, retro-plush décor with chandeliers and soft draperies that feel more uptown that East Village. While it carries many of the same labels as Odin, it has bolstered its assortment with lines like Clu and Loeffler Randall that, so far, are just for ladies. The genteel ambiance is a welcome contrast to the hectic, "white box with packed racks" environments of its aforementioned competition.
The staff (of three on a quiet Monday afternoon) is genial and friendly, and though the store is as tiny as its siblings, they make it warm and inviting. We are already willing to predict that, like Odin, Pas De Deux is only an appetizer for a much larger satellite in a higher profile location in short order.
Pas De Deux 328 East 11th Street, East Village

Mike Albo Goes Shopping:Lighten Up Edition

In today's Thursday Styles, Mike Albo takes the Critical Shopper reins and visits Rogan's gloomy new East Village boutique. It's a fairly straightforward evaluation, and without his characteristic personal disclosures and vexations over prices, Mike gets to the root of the matter pretty quickly.

Obviously his sober vision strikes a chord: the clothes here are well-conceived, wearable and reflect our contemporary anomie, but they also make you wish the person wearing them would just stop being so intense about everything, throw up his hands and say, “Oh, what do I know, I am such a total dipstick!”

Mike has managed to put his finger on exactly what has begun to rub us the wrong way about Rogan, and that is that somewhere along the way (like when he opened this store) he seemed to cross the line dividing intriguing and pretentious. Lighten up Rogan. Sometimes people just want to buy clothes.
Oh, there's also the 70% off sale he mentions, which makes everything OK!
Critical Shopper - Rogan: Misery Loves Flattery by Mike Albo (NYTimes)
Rogan 330 Bowery, East Village

Expansion Alert:Odin Begets Pas de DeuxFor Ladies This August

Our friends over at The Cut broke some welcome news late yesterday. The tireless pair behind Odin and its revolving stock sibling, Den, are expanding once again. Eddy Chai and Paul Birardi will open Pas de Deux, a counterpart for the ladies, next month along the same East 11th Street row as its siblings.
Pas de Deux promises as fanciful and feminine an ambiance Odin's is refined and masculine. The roster of labels sounds like a woman's mirror to her next-door neighbor's mix of updated classics and accessible avant-garde brands including Shipley & Halmos and Alexander Wang among other emerging designers. Ordinarily, the news of a ladies' boutique coming from the men from menswear-land might give The Shophound pause, but Chai and Birardi have demonstrated flawless merchandising instincts thus far. By this Fall, we predict that their little pocket of the East Village will become a new shopping epicenter.
Odin Duo Opening Women’s Store in August (The Cut)

Today In Relocation:Chocolate Bar Heads East

After losing its original West Village space to the usual rent-related drama, Chocolate Bar has migrated East, and today marks its Grand Opening on East 7th Street.
Along with its usual arrays of sweets and drinks, artisanal egg creams have been added to the options offered at the new location.
If chocolate alone isn't enough to lure you in, the fine folks at Chocolate Bar are offering a Meet the Neighbors Special to celebrate the opening of its new home, which includes 1/2 price drip coffee and espresso for the first month and a complimentary stencil bar with every iced or hot liquid chocolate purchase (while supplies last).
Chocolate Bar 127 East 7th Street between 1st Avenue & Avenue A