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THE COOL
STREETS OF
NORTH
AMERICA
Retail lives and dies by cool. Concepts connect,
build loyalty, and grow by being cool. They also
disengage, wither, and die by not being cool. If
nothing else, the history of fashion is the history
of what is cool and what is desirable.
But, as anyone in retail will tell you, fashion can be a fickle mistress.
Every generation has had its own definition of cool, but cool
constantly evolves. In today’s media-saturated age some may
argue that the issue of what is cool has never been more important
to consumers, nor has it ever been as likely to change with
lightning speed as it is now.
If retailers live and die by cool, the same also holds true of retail
properties, shopping centers and entire neighborhoods. Whenever
we speak about real estate, the issue of location and a number of
other factors come into play, but the reality is that cool matters. In
an age of frugal consumers, e-commerce encroachment, and vast
gaps in performance between trophy malls and Class B and C
centers, cool matters now more than ever.
How Do You Define Cool?
“I know it when I see it…”
Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart describing his threshold
test for obscenity in the landmark 1964 case Jacobellis v. Ohio
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CUSHMAN & WAKEFIELD