Mango Ushering in a New Era

The Barcelona based retailer Mango is putting all of their brands under one roof and launching 200 megastores in 2014.

"We are starting a new era of Mango," said Daniel Lopez, vice president. "We ended last year with 1.7 billion euros [$2.31 billion at current exchange] in sales. Our idea is to be 5 billion euros [$6.7 billion] turnover in the next four or five years. We're going to achieve this through organic growth and the megastores."

Mango is following a similar path to rivals H&M, Zara and Uniqlo, which have been opening bigger and bigger stores to contain expanding collections.

"What we are seeing is that for [the] Mango women's range, we need a minimum of 10,760 square feet of selling space," said Lopez. "We're turning our stores more into family stores. We're also adding the men's range, H.E. by Mango, and Mango Touch."

Lopez can easily lists off where the additional square footage will go: 3,200 square feet for men's; a new kids' collection for boys and girls (3-12 years old) at 1,290 to 1,614,square feet, and the new Mango Sport & Intimates, 215 square feet to 430 square feet. The line includes an intimates collection and apparel for sports, homewear and yogawear. In February, Mango is launching its plus size line Violetta, which will require 3,767 square feet of space.

"The idea of megastores is a change in our DNA," Lopez said. "Any store we are going to open from now on will have to have these requirements. There are going to be places were we cannot enlarge our Mango store as we would wish," he said, referring to existing stores without available adjacent real estate. "We will have to open two or three stores. This is not the ideal."

The few megastores that have opened have already been well received Lopez said.

"The result so far is fantastic," Lopez said. "Sales compared to what we were experiencing are tremendous. We are very happy because in certain locations we've been able to do three and four times the turnover we were doing in the smaller business."

Thirteen mega stores are planned for this year, the transition year, with 200 planned for 2014.

The megastores will be concentrated abroad in Spain, France, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Russia, Italy, Norway and Poland and in cities such as Barcelona; Bilbao, Spain; Paris; Maastricht and the Netherlands. Mango will open its largest store - 24,757 square feet - in Munich in October.

There's no word yet on when the megastore will hit the U.S.

"In the States, are working towards clustering our footprint," Lopez said. "We want to cluster in the regions where we're already present to create better communication with consumers."

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