How Barneys is Digitizing its New York City Flagship Store

Barneys New York is opening a flagship store in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood. The location, which will take up almost an entire city block on 7th Avenue, is a homecoming: it’s where the luxury department store, then a menswear brand, was originally founded in 1923. The return to its downtown roots comes about 20 years after the Chelsea store closed and Barneys migrated uptown to Madison Avenue. Its reclamation of the original location comes at a time when physical retail is undergoing a digital renaissance powered by mobile, social media content and online-to-offline shipping and pickup.