Yahoo Lifestyle Runyon Group Developers on Their New ‘Boutique Lifestyle Center’ in Montecito, Calif., and Fluid Leasing Strategy
The shopping scene in tony Santa Barbara, Calif., suburb Montecito keeps heating up.
Runyon Group retail developers Joey Miller and David Fishbein, who own Platform in Culver City and have consulted on Palisades Village and the Rock Center Shops, among other properties, have opened a new shopping destination: The Post.
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Comprising six historical buildings at 1801 East Cabrillo Boulevard, the center will have 13 specialty merchants, including the partners’ own Optimist men’s and Teller women’s multilabel stores, as well as The Great and Janessa Leoné from Los Angeles, Merlette from New York City and Maygel Coronel from Colombia. Four of the stores are open now, with the remainder expected by spring.
“This is essentially our sequel 10 years later,” Fishbein, 38, said of the project that stays true to the indie mix of Platform in Culver City, which averages $1,000 sales per square foot, with 1 million visitors a year, and has 16 stores including Aesop, Reformation, Wyeth and Catbird, as well as food and beverage.
The two fell in love with the American Riviera, as it’s known, during COVID-19 (as did many others) and began exploring the idea of opening something in the wealthy community, which in recent years has seen ever-expanding luxury retail offerings at developer Rick Caruso’s Rosewood Miramar Hotel, and more boutique brands such as Dôen and Clare Vivier proliferating at Jim Rosenfield’s Montecito Country Mart.
“The property is very special. It’s on what’s effectively almost like a private street that fronts an ocean side lagoon that’s a duck pond,” Fishbein said of the parcel with 38,000 leasable square feet, which they purchased in May 2022 for $19.25 million.
Though retail has been amping up in the area for some time, with Bottega Veneta, Loro Piana and more recent openings at Miramar, they still saw opportunity for a shopping center with a large common area, and a wider range of interesting food and beverage options.
The Post has 7,000 square feet of those with unique new concepts sourced locally including Little King, a coffee shop created by the former managers of Michelin-starred Bell’s in Los Alamos; grab and go from L.A. meal delivery service Organic Oren, which was cofounded by chef Oren Giladi and celebrity pilates instructor Amanda Kassar, and another location of the popular Venice, Calif. Italian restaurant Ospi.
“We didn’t want this property to feel like something that you would only want to come to once every few months, but that it would be a place you are thinking about daily, whether it was for your coffee, or your breakfast burrito, or just to come and see some great local shops,” Fishbein said.
They took a similar approach to curating the stores.
“Maygel Coronel, it’s the first U.S. store and it’s Merlette’s first U.S. store…so slightly more of a discovery edge. And frankly, Montecito could take a lot more. There’s a lot more demand than supply,” he said of the environment.
The project is funded off the success of Platform, with no institutional money behind it.
Part of their edge as developers is that they are also retailers, they said. At Platform and The Post, their own multilabel boutiques The Optimist, which opened in 2019, and Teller, which opened in 2021, have acted as farm teams for new tenants.
“Through those stores, we end up getting to be connected with all these amazing designers at much earlier levels in their trajectories as brands than we typically did in the past, where the soonest we could touch them was when they could open a pop-up or a permanent store,” Fishbein said.
“Merlette, for example, was a brand that we were carrying at Teller, and we were seeing them perform really well, and we built up a relationship with the founders.…They were always toying with the idea of getting into brick-and-mortar retail, and there was a comfort level, because we had the relationship through the store,” Fishbein said.
“David and Joey totally won us over with their innovative vibe at The Platform in Culver City, which impressed us with its mix of like-minded independent brands. So when it came to opening Merlette’s first brick-and-mortar at The Post, we knew it was the perfect fit. Set in a stunning location by the bird refuge and not far from the beach, they’ve nailed creating a relaxed, family-friendly environment,” said Marina Cortbawi, founder and creative director of the women’s brand, which is based in Brooklyn.
Fishbein’s wife, Jaime, who does the buying for Teller, found Maygel Cornonel’s swim and resortwear online when she was on the hunt for new labels. “The founders were looking at Dallas and Miami and Montecito is ultimately where they decided to land first.…So the multilabel stores have been really great tools for us,” he said.
The Teller store also has a residency program, where a brand can do a monthlong stint in the store. The first three rolling out in Montecito are with the L.A. brand Co, then Jonathan Simkhai and then LaPointe.
“The brands are using it as a way for them to test, ‘could I do a store?’ And that’s also become, like, this great way for us to see who the right brands that we should be focused on to be the next generation of signing leases,” Fishbein said.
The process is designed to be fluid, so a brand can graduate from an in-store residency to a pop-up and maybe a permanent store.
“I feel like our industry for many years was like, ‘sign this long-term lease with a guarantee or you can’t have anything,'” said Miller, 42. “And we look at it like, hey, if we’re going to be successful, we’re going to be successful together. If you want a 10-year lease and we believe that it’s accretive to the overall mix to the property, we’re happy to sign that with you. If you want a two-year lease, that’s fine, and maybe you just want to come in for a residency or a pop-up. It gives a brand a lot options to engage with us, and it gives us a lot of opportunity to see what happens. Because there were plenty of brands when we started Platform, when we were like, oh my god, we would love to have them. And a year later, they’ve gone downhill. You get to keep your mix pretty dynamic.”
“And then there’s other brands that we as retailers are cautious about bringing on for wholesale because we don’t know if they’re gonna perform. And then if we see the residency do really well, we buy into them for next season,” Fishbein said.
They’re looking at a number of different projects throughout California and the U.S., they said.
“People don’t want to do all of their discovery shopping online. They like to go in person,” Miller said of the overall retail market. “So multibrand, luxury sites are a very, very tough business, especially because they’re trying to trade off of brands that want to just sell to the customer directly. Department stores are just simply not the venue that people want to spend their time in anymore, because what department stores offered was both convenience and a wide selection. What’s more convenient with a wider selection than Amazon? And we just think that these boutique, curated centers…are going to win in this new era. We’d like to build a lot more.”
“There’s so many brands that have emerged over the last decade that were in wholesale, and they’re now just trickling into retail like the Totemes and Khaites of the world,” Fishbein said. “They’re not necessarily looking to go into the big crazy malls, or the big mixed-use projects. They’re looking for the more boutique style places. And there’s dozens of brands like them. While retail or malls may be down, the demand for the retail we are creating is increasing. The brands coming out now have different needs, they have different aesthetic needs, they have different needs of co-tenancy,” he said.
“What we’re seeing going into 2025 and 2026 is that there’s a lot of great retail markets around the country that have only been served by high-end malls or high-end power centers for the last 50 years,” Miller said. “And the customers that are living there are wanting different options, and we think that we can fill that.”
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