What Would it Take to Bring Fred Segal Back?

When Fred Segal closed the last of its stores last summer, it seemed like the end of an era. 

But then a landing page at fredsegal.com was parked in a glimmer of hope that the Los Angeles boutique retailer might make its way back into the marketplace. 

And, to be clear, the brand is not extinct. It still exists at Resorts World in Las Vegas and the home store in Malibu. But, the multi-brand retail emporiums in its hometown of Los Angeles? Gone.

Still, little has been said in the way of what the future holds for the business. Should it bounce back, it could restore the L.A. boutique retail landscape to the glory days—or even better—to a time when in-store merchandising was celebrated over online comparison shopping and products going viral

Some might call “back then” the glory days of Los Angeles retail. 

The center of that universe revolved around Fred Segal, Ron Herman and Ron Robinson, all of which offered a high-end boutique experience that was cool, not stuffy. The younger Kitson business entered the fray in Los Angeles in 2000, sharply elbowing its way into relevance and now remains the last one standing from an era when Los Angeles-inspired boutiques led the market locally and globally. 

The more competition, the more buyers and merchants stepped up their game to best one another on finding the next hottest item, product exclusives and the showmanship around splashy celebrity customers. The boutiques became centers of culture that gave less than scientific, but still appreciated, reads of the times (such as how many more “Team Aniston” T-shirts sold over “Team Jolie”).

Too Big Too Fast?

To stage a Fred Segal comeback would require not repeating the mistakes of the past.

Opening more storefronts and gaining new brands and consumers became conflated with retail success. They’re not the same and any good merchant will tell you so. More expansion through increased revenue doesn’t necessarily equate to consistent, long-term growth.

When Fred Segal struck its global licensing deal with Sandow Media in 2012, it set into motion what some might say was its slow crumbling with the desire to build a global brand rather than further home in on retailing. 

Sandow Chair and CEO Adam Sandow expressed a measured approach to WWD in 2014, when he cautioned he didn’t want to overdo it on licensing.  

“I started to feel honestly like I was going to make a mistake if I just went down the road of building a licensing business,” Sandow told WWD. “I felt the brand deserved more and I felt there was more we could do with it.” 

To avoid simply building another licensing business, Sandow brought on Evolution Media Partners as an equity investor and installed Paul Blum, former Juicy Couture and David Yurman CEO, to lead Fred Segal’s growth. 

That included the 2017 Sunset Boulevard flagship in West Hollywood that came in at a cavernous 21,000 square feet and uprooted the boutique from its long-time Melrose Avenue and Crescent Heights Boulevard location. 

Blum said in a statement at the time of his appointment, the business aimed to open as many as 10 Fred Segal “lifestyle” concepts. 

“The convergence of fashion, technology and media has created a great opportunity to leverage Fred Segal’s Southern California celebrity heritage,” Blum said. 

It sounded right for the time. Execution didn’t live up to the comment and the spaces lacked the intimacy and creative electricity of the original location. 

Fred Segal’s Global Icons Era

Two years later, the brand was shuttled to Global Icons, which bought a majority stake in the business, with Evolution holding onto a minority share. 

The same promises of store growth continued, and Global Icons appeared to be on a tear with new locations in The Shops at Sportsmen’s Lodge in Studio City, Santa Monica, Marin, Malibu and Resorts World Las Vegas. 

However, big shifts began taking place last year. That’s when the Marin Country Mart and Montana Avenue door in Santa Monica closed, less than a year after both had opened. 

The Shops at Sportsmen’s Lodge location closed in early July 2024, about two years after it opened. 

In the weeks leading up to the store closures, nearly everything was on markdown—from the designer clothing and accessories to candles and whole displays of Fred Segal-branded merchandise.  

At the end of July 2024, Fred Segal’s online shop closed, along with the Malibu and flagship Sunset Boulevard locations. 

“Everything just fell apart [after Covid], and then I sort of had to become a retailer, which is not what I planned to do,” Global Icons CEO Jeff Lotman told the Los Angeles Times last August. “I knew nothing about retail.” 

At least Lotman was forthcoming about the downfall. 

The company was in talks to potentially sell the business, but a trade never materialized, according to a source with knowledge of the matter. 

There was little fanfare and no official announcement when Fred Segal closed. It was simply lights out. 

Fred Segal and the Domino Effect

That slow decline didn’t happen in a vacuum. It had a domino effect on other high-end boutiques. 

Ron Robinson, who got his start at Fred Segal, closed his Santa Monica store in November 2019, with the 41-year-old Melrose Avenue location shuttering in early 2020. While the veteran retailer maintains an online store, it’s a fraction of the fanciful world Robinson created in real life via his brick-and-mortar concepts.

The U.S. presence of Ron Herman—another Fred Segal alum—evaporated next with the boutique’s Malibu Country Mart store closing in 2023, followed by the San Vicente Boulevard door in Brentwood shuttering in October of that same year. The iconic Melrose Avenue door closed in December 2023. 

All that remains of Ron Herman in the U.S. is the Moana Surfrider Westin Resort & Spa location in Waikiki. The brand’s owner, Sazaby League, has placed the brand’s bets in Japan, where there are more than 25 Ron Herman locations. 

Sazaby is a distributor and operator of several contemporary fashion and food brands, including local names such as Outerknown, Mother and Spinelli Kilcollin. 

What LA Retail Needs

Today the house of Fred Segal is a shadow of its former self. 

The brand remains through the Fred Segal Home store in Malibu, the closest approximation to the epicenter of cultural clout it once had. The Las Vegas store at Resorts World bears that iconic red-and-blue signage but little of the DNA that defined Fred Segal.  

When Fred Segal Home launched, it received the standard attention of Women’s Wear Daily, offering the thread that the concept could serve as the next step for the growing business. The idea being home and gift offered a stronger moat around the headwinds of an apparel-heavy boutique.

Fred Segal Home now touts itself as the “premier home décor and fashion brand” for Los Angeles. Maybe. 

The vintage T-shirts it sells of Bud from “Married with Children,” ’90s brand Bad Boy Club and George Powell and Stacy Peralta’s Powell Peralta skate brand reach for a kind of relevance the retailer once had. 

That’s not to say it can’t be had again, but going back to the basics of retailing could be good for its next act, instead of plotting expansions that may not make sense. At least one executive who steered the Fred Segal ship in more recent years acknowledged the level of skill required in operating a multi-brand store. 

L.A. retail could use a jolt of new, which is the definition of retail at its simplest, if not to keep things fresh but to also force the kind of creativity that’s born out of fierce competition. 

“Retail is hard,” Lotman told the Times post-Fred Segal closure, “and being a multi-brand retailer is even harder.”