Shoppers hunting for bargains as sale in Arthur Beren’s Beverly Hills store wound down. The retailer continues to operate two successful shops in San Francisco.

Selling high-end shoes in Beverly Hills might sound like a cakewalk, but Arthur Beren Shoes found that it can be tougher than it appears.

With two successful stores in the San Francisco area, the upscale merchant decided two years ago to expand to Beverly Hills, opening on Wilshire Boulevard between Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman Marcus. But business never gelled as well as the retailer had hoped it would, and it decided to return its focus to the Bay Area.

That’s when Buxbaum Group got the call to help with the liquidation. “We had worked for them years ago when they closed another store, and they called us back because we generated such a strong return for them at that time,” said Stevan Buxbaum, the Buxbaum Group executive vice president, who directs marketing and business development efforts.

At issue was inventory valued at about $1.5 million – nearly 10,000 pairs of shoes, including such brands as Bruno Magli, Cole Haan, Prada, Miu Miu, and Casadei.

The liquidation sale began in November and was scheduled to end just before Christmas, and it was not without challenges. “The City of Beverly Hills is very particular,” Buxbaum noted. To begin with, the city controls the size of window signs, limiting them to about 25% of the window area and requiring that they be tasteful. Neon-yellow signage wasn’t in the picture.

Nevertheless, Buxbaum Group was successful in bringing in both existing and new customers. “We sent two pieces of direct mail using the company’s mailing list of Southern California customers,” Buxbaum related. “In the second piece, we switched from a traditional percentage discount to price-point discounts.”

The result was huge crowds – four to six times the traffic of a year earlier. “It was a very exciting sale,” Buxbaum said.
While Beverly Hills and expensive footwear might seem a good fit, Buxbaum noted that liquidating shoes can be difficult. “Shoes are hard because of size issues, and this store specialized in hard-to-find sizes, so we had lots of unusual wides and narrows. That’s the challenge. There is no doubt there’s demand in Beverly Hills, but the shoes still have to fit,” he said. “It made for an interesting challenge, but we did well with it.”

Because Arthur Beren still has two popular stores, any inventory that didn’t sell could be packed up and shipped to the Bay Area.

To Stevan Buxbaum, this was a case of excellent performance on a prior project coming back to help the company. “We did a great job for them, and they remembered that. It’s why we try so hard to do the best we can for every client.”