Holt Renfrew’s Mario Grauso Talks Growth

After sitting back and watching competitors enter its territory, Canada’s Holt Renfrew is renovating, modernizing and embracing the creme de la creme of the luxury market. “Catching up is really the way to say it,” Mario Grauso, the president of Holt Renfrew, told WWD. “We were a little behind for a certain amount of time. Now we are getting to the place we should have been a few years ago.” For the Toronto-based Holt Renfrew, “catching up” means investing in the business — $400 million Canadian for a spectrum of brick-and-mortar, e-commerce, omnichannel and technology projects that began in 2017 and conclude in 2020. It also means defending the home turf. Long the only upscale department store in Canada, the 182-year-old Holt Renfrew has since the Nineties witnessed luxury retailers from Tiffany to Prada trickling into downtown Vancouver and onto Bloor Street and Yorkville Avenue in Toronto, and in the past four years, Nordstrom and Saks Fifth Avenue have planted stores in Toronto, Calgary, Ottawa and Vancouver. In Canada, Nordstrom has six stores and Saks has three. Asked about the impact of Nordstrom and Saks, Grauso replied: “Our volume has only gone up. We have heavily differentiated in this market. That is our approach. It

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from WWDWWD http://bit.ly/2UNRNzu