In Bellevue, Beverly Hills meets its match - Business First of Columbus:

fixyruw.wordpress.com
Drawing 10-mile rings around the two shopping a retail consulting firm found a larger pool of affluent consumers around Bellevue thanBeverly Hills. The data were compiled for the Pugett Sound Business Journal bythe Calif.-based , and bolster some belief that the Seattle area is developing the wealthj and fashion sense to support a larger armadw of luxury retailers. “It’s been the most dramatic over the last threer tofour years,” said Wayne Hussey, a executive who helped pick Bellevuew for the high-end chain’s first Northwest which opens in While the recession has cast a pall over high-enc shopping, the long-term trend for the Seattle-Bellevuw area, some say, is towarfd a growing cohort of prosperous, aging professional s primed to embrace a more formal lifestyl e — for example, buying splashy clothes for charityh events.
“It’s not so much lifestyle, but the next level above that life stages,” said Jim CEO of in Bellevue. “Life Now it’s cool to buy a Lexus, cool to have a Mercedes or a new And that extendsto clothes, said Tom Woodworth, senio r investment director at Schnitzer West, which is developing Neima n Marcus’ Bellevue store at The Bravern mixed-use project. If the demographics are any indicator, Woodwortgh said, the Bellevue Neiman Marcus coul be within the top quarter of storew inthe chain. A 10-mile ring arouncd downtown Bellevue nets theMicrosoft campus, Sammamish Lake Washington’s “Gold Coast” and most of Seattle.
A 10-milw ring around Beverly Hills, Calif., yields thre e times as many residentsoverall — but a smaller proportionb of the class of consumers that ESRI definee as most desirable. Some Northwesterners might be shocked to see Bellevuw win a demographic smackdown withthe nation’s most famouslyu affluent ZIP code, Beverl y Hills 90210 (also home to one of the highest-grossingh Neiman Marcus stores in the But compared with the 10 miles surrounding Beverly Hills, the 10-miled ring within reach of Bellevue yieldz three times the proportion of households in the demographi tier ESRI calls High Society — married professionals with a medianm household income of $104,934.
High Society covera seven “psychodemographic” subsegments of well-educated urban and suburban homeowners. Twenty-sevej percent of residents within Bellevue’s reach belong to High compared with 7 percent arouncdBeverly Hills. In sheer numbers, the 2.8 milliom population within 10 miles of Beverly Rodeo Drive is nearly three times that in the 10 mile s surroundingdowntown Bellevue. Even so, Bellevue’sd ring contains more High Society types thanBeverly — 280,271 versus 193,804. On the othert hand, the Beverly Hills ring has more than four timed as manyresidents (108,672) in the very wealthiest subsegmeng of High Society, which ESRI callse Top Rung.
The Top Rung segmenty — people with substantial stock portfolioes who play a prominent civicrole — also accountss for a higher share of the populatio surrounding Beverly Hills (4 percent, compared with Bellevue’ 2.3 percent). But Bellevue bests Beverly Hillain ESRI’s next-wealthiest major demographic tier: Upscale These consumers have a mediamn household income of $70,504 and constitutd one in four people in the Bellevue ring, comparec with 8 percent of people surrounding Beverly Locating a store in Bellevue allowzs Neiman’s to capture the upscaler neighborhoods on the Issaquah plateau while stillp reaching most of Seattle.
Putting the stor e in Seattle would have placedthose far-Eastside shoppers outside the 10-mil e radius that many retailera view as their prime consumer Nevertheless, Neiman’s Hussey shares localp developers’ belief that the concentration of high-end retaip in Bellevue will draw wealthy shopper from throughout the Northwest and Western While luxury sales are down becaus e of the economy, Hussey said, “Wed make these decisions not for the shortt term, but the long term.
”