Bravern New World
The people, place and time are sure to make Schnitzer Northwest’s The Shops at Bravern a retail bellwether in Bellevue, Washington.
Brian A. Lee

Like the area’s many intrepid, risk-taking entrepreneurs after which it is named, The Bravern in Bellevue, Washington, is seeing its bold mixed-use plan bear substantial fruit. And construction only recently started on the Schnitzer Northwest project. Shopping Center Business recently traveled to the Seattle area to see firsthand what all of the excitement is about.

More than an homage to the area’s brilliant business minds, The Bravern is quickly following their successful path. Anchor Neiman-Marcus was the first tenant to be signed by Schnitzer, marking the luxury retailer’s first store in the Pacific Northwest, and Microsoft has agreed to occupy all 740,000 square feet of the development’s office space.

Located at the gateway to Seattle’s burgeoning east side suburb, The Bravern will feature 305,000 square feet of upscale retail, two Class A office buildings, 450 condominiums in two residential towers and more than 3,100 parking stalls. Neiman Marcus and 180,000 square feet of upscale retail and restaurant space on two floors constitute The Shops at The Bravern, the base of the mixed-use development connecting all of its components by an open-air, pedestrian lane.

Situated just a block away from Interstate 405, the main north-south arterial east of Lake Washington, the 5-acre development site is bounded by NE 8th and NE 6th streets and 112th and 110th avenues. Offering access points off all four streets that make up its perimeter, The Bravern site adjoins Meydenbauer Convention Center, which brings 250,000 visitors annually to Bellevue, and is located within close proximity of city hall.

According to Tom Woodworth, senior investment director for Schnitzer Northwest, about 3,200 residential units — a mix of apartments and for-sale product — will be delivered to the Bellevue market by the time the project opens, adding considerable walk-up demand to the property’s on-site resident shoppers.

Besides the company’s personnel that will office at The Bravern, Microsoft’s 35,000 to 40,000 employees at its Redmond, Washington, headquarters will be a mere 15 minutes away from the development’s upscale retail and quality restaurants. All told, the development’s daily onsite population will exceed 5,000, with an additional 120,000 people employed close by.

Rendering Regal Retail

Opening in 2009, The Shops at The Bravern will be anchored by a three-level, 125,000-square-foot Neiman-Marcus store, the first of its kind north of San Francisco.

“It’ll be a nice regional draw,” says Woodworth. “You’ll get people coming up from Portland, Oregon; flying over for the weekend from Boise, Montana and Wyoming; and it’ll attract a pretty good population down from Vancouver, British Columbia, which is 140 miles north.”

The retail giant didn’t agree to put down roots in the Seattle area just for the scenery. Schnitzer Northwest was in the retail tenanting process when Neiman-Marcus requested a market segmentation analysis and demographic comparison with the top 12 upscale retail destinations in the country, including Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, California, and Michigan Avenue in Chicago. The numbers didn’t lie.

“What we learned was that the psychographics and demographics of this Bellevue location dictated that this would be one of the highest performing retail markets in the country,” says Woodworth. “When you compare against the top 12, this is really a top 5 market measuring within a 10-mile radius.”

The Bravern location ranked Number 1 in average family household income, Number 5 in projected population growth from 2005 to 2010 and Number 9 in number of households among the 12 elite retail destinations across the country. The retail site more than held its own in the inter-demographic survey, so Schnitzer Northwest turned its attention to statistics within the Seattle metro area. The developer found that nine of the Puget Sound’s top 10 zip codes in both wealth and income are located east of or on Bellevue’s side of Lake Washington.

“It’s no surprise they all sit along the waterfront,” says Woodworth. “What was particularly interesting to us was the concentration of wealth up on the plateau east of Lake Sammamish, [which is east of Bellevue].”

Residents in those posh communities are more likely to shop mid-week at a high-end Bellevue location than drive the additional 40 to 50 minutes roundtrip to and from Seattle, risking the chance of getting stuck in traffic on the I-90 or State Hwy. 520 bridges. The physical barriers that shoppers east of Lake Sammamish face when trying to access luxury goods in downtown Seattle indicated that there was significant sales leakage from those east side submarkets. Neiman-Marcus’ data confirmed the views of the Schnitzer Northwest team.

“When the retailer looked at its own credit card, Internet and catalog sales, it was actually doing fairly significant volume of business there,” says Woodworth. “Neiman-Marcus prepared a scatter diagram to see where those buyers were. They were substantially concentrated on the east side. That told us that there was a real opportunity to serve an upper-end market. That’s where we started to concentrate our energy.”

Getting Retail Right

Despite the old adage, real estate is not all location, location, location. One must deliver a quality product once that prime property is secured. Schnitzer Northwest wasn’t about to waste a rare opportunity to develop standout retail at the intersection of such dazzling positioning and demographics. 

“You need to offer a point of differentiation and that was the big opportunity then to lift the level of service, the quality of goods and the environment up to a higher level to be consistent with what the market was indicating,” says Woodworth.

For starters, the marketplace already had a traditional, enclosed suburban mall, the 1.3 million-square-foot Bellevue Square. Schnitzer Northwest would create a unique, elegantly appointed, open-air retail environment, complete with two ceremonial arrival courts, valet parking and concierge services. Secondly, area demographics indicated a need for luxury retail, but consumer attitudes had to back that up.

“Neiman-Marcus looked at its 37 other existing stores on an income and population basis as well as a psychographic component, which was the propensity of the wealth in the area to actually spend at its store,” says Mark Netherland, investment manager at Schnitzer Northwest. “It took the 12 key lifestyle segments that are most likely to shop at its store. What Neiman-Marcus found is even though the density wasn’t as great as some of the other markets, there’s 50 percent more of its key lifestyle households within a 10-mile radius of The Bravern than the 37-store average. It indicated to them that the wealth has always been here but now the propensity to buy was here. [Area residents] are not just buying Gortex, skis, bikes, boats and cars. They actually buy fashion, too.”

The Bravern’s location, demographics and psychographics were all green lights, but Schnitzer’s homework wasn’t done. The next step in the development program came through focus groups. Consumers, retailers, office tenants and residents weighed in on the variety of proposed uses and what was missing in the market, after which retail leasing experts from near and far — Seattle-based Susan Zimmerman of GVA Kidder Mathews and Wendy Silverman of Chicago-based Creative Retail Leasing — were brought in to interpret the data.

Says Woodworth, “We identified who these people were, put them in rooms and asked them specific questions like: What’s your ideal shopping environment like? What do you like best about the shopping experience? What about parking? What should the mix be? We really let them build the merchandising plan.”

The focus groups told the Bravern development team that they wanted an outdoor retail environment on a fairly intimate scale. When the word European kept coming up in the respondents’ descriptions of their ideal location, the tireless team and its horde of designers jumped on a plane and toured 28 cities worldwide, including a handful of European cities, in addition to many in Canada and the United States.

“When you go to Europe, you look at hundreds of years of evolution of environments, uses and experiences,” says Dan Ivanoff, managing investment partner at Schnitzer Northwest. “It was also really valuable to look at properties that did not work back here. It’s easy to make  mistakes if you do not work through all the pieces. It has to be completely synergistic.”

From focus-group responses to the company’s photos of European landscapes, storefronts, restaurants and paving, Schnitzer Northwest learned about consumer desires for off-street arrival and intimate, pedestrian shopping experiences. This led to the design of The Shops at Bravern’s elegant and charming, but not contrived, open-air retail environment.

“With the sensibility of the Northwest, where it’s much like the Midwest, if it’s not real or authentic, people will dismiss it,” says Woodworth. “It was about blending the movement of space and how spaces are organized and the types of experiences you can create into a more authentic feel. That’s what we’ve executed here. It has elements of European scale, walkability and cafes that spill out into the promenade.”

“The response has been great,” continues Woodworth. “Neiman Marcus is a great anchor to get started with, and we’ve had plenty of [tenant] activity for being 2.5 years out from getting delivered.”

The consumer response and activity also promises to be great when The Shops at The Bravern opens in the latter half of 2009. The prime Bellevue location, the area’s untapped shopping wherewithal and a developer’s diligence ensure that it will be.


©2007 France Publications, Inc. Duplication or reproduction of this article not permitted without authorization from France Publications, Inc. For information on reprints of this article contact Barbara Sherer at (630) 554-6054.