Yahoo Sports Ciara’s and Russell Wilson’s House of LR&C Reshapes Retail, Plays Up Good Man Brand
Eighteen months after opening the first brick-and-mortar for The House of LR&C, the power couple Ciara and Russell Wilson are repositioning the retail side of the business.
Executives at the company declined interview requests about the closures in Seattle; Scottsdale, Arizona; and Denver, which occurred respectively in June 2022 and in June and July this year. The House of LR&C also had a 1,500-square-foot outpost in New York at the Roosevelt Field Mall that debuted last November and folded in late April of this year. The House of LR&C uses stand-alone retail to showcase its three brands: men’s with Good Man Brand, women’s with LITA (Love Is the Answer) by Ciara and its gender-neutral line, Human Nation.
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The House of LR&C location wasn’t alone in exiting Seattle. The multi-Pro Bowl quarterback Wilson now plays for the Denver Broncos, having been traded by the Seattle Seahawks. In step with that, the brand has shuttered a Lone Tree’s Park Meadows mall location in Denver that was opened last summer. A company spokeswoman described that location Friday as a pop-up and said that its 12-month lease did not have a renewal option.
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Subsequently, the company unveiled a 500-square-foot store for its Good Man Brand in Denver International Airport last month through a travel retail partnership with Hudson, a Dufry company. Hudson and The House of LR&C teamed on a selection of menswear for the new store. There are plans to open additional airport outposts to build the Good Man Brand, with Chicago being considered, according to the company.
In a statement provided by a House of LR&C spokeswoman, chief commercial officer and chief marketing officer Janelle Shiplett said its “pop-up stores officially concluded” in Scottsdale, Seattle and Denver at the end of last month. She said the short-term leases were in pop-up locations that were only temporarily available.
Noting that the company is “looking forward to meeting our customer online and on the move,” she said the omni-retail strategy is to drive growth across its fashion brands via the company’s site, wholesale partnerships with such retailers as Nordstrom, Saks Fifth Avenue and Revolve, and brick-and-mortar airport locations in key markets. “We will look forward to adding more airport locations in the future to meet our Good Man Brand customer on the move with our elevated essentials made to travel,” Shiplett said.
But when unveiling the 1,200-square-foot Seattle store in February 2022, Ciara referred to it as “a big milestone for our team,” in an interview with WWD at that time. “As we open the doors to our first store at The House of LR&C, we feel blessed to offer our customers a hands-on experience to understand and see our values of love, respect and care come to life,” Ciara told WWD at the time.
In addition, House of LR&C’s cofounder and chief executive officer Christine Day said at that time, “We believe shopping in-store will always be a key part of the retail experience. We see smaller retail store footprint in size and number of stores will become the new normal to continue to meet our new and returning customers.”
Shiplett said Friday via email, “Seattle was a milestone in that it was our first retail location, we knew we only had six months there and hoped to be able to find another space; unfortunately there was not another suitable location at University Village available for us. As a small and innovative brand, we are evolving to meet the ever-changing retail landscape. Our partnership with Dufry featuring GMB is a good example of how we are evolving in this ever-changing industry.”
In 2020, the Grammy-winning singer and songwriter Ciara and the NFL veteran Wilson got into fashion to create a sustainable company that aimed to have an impact not just on culture and through technology, but on the health of the world. “Hopefully, we can have real change around the world because of The House of LR&C. Those three values — love, respect and care — are global values that we all need. It starts with our home, but also our team and our partners. It goes to our community,” Wilson told WWD in 2021.
The company donates 3 percent of every purchase to the Why Not You Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to education, children’s health and fighting poverty. It is also B Corp. certified for its sustainability practices. Ciara and Shiplett were among the House of LR&C executives who spoke about sustainability at the Conscious Fashion and Lifestyle Network event at the United Nations headquarters in June.
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