Department store chain Kohl's Corp. will open its first downtown Milwaukee store in fall of 2023 in the space of former competitor Boston Store.
Kohl's (NYSE: KSS) will open a roughly 40,000-square-foot, smaller-format store in the Hub640 building at West Wisconsin and North Vel R. Phillips avenues. That ground-floor retail space has been vacant since summer of 2018 when Boston Store closed. The Milwaukee Business Journal was the first to report plans for the store July 12.
The new store will include an in-store Sephora shop as part of the department store's partnership with the cosmetics company. It will also have an Amazon return area and feature what CEO Michelle Gass called hyper-localization in its product offerings.
"That is basically taking the assortments we have, but tailoring it, so you might have some stores that buy more Nike, some that buy more Under Armour," she said at the Friday announcement of the new location. "It's really tailored around what's relevant to the community, and that's all based on data and then on local products."
She expects the downtown Milwaukee store will also sell a lot of Milwaukee Bucks and Milwaukee Brewers gear given its location.
"Kohl's is part of the renaissance that is happening in downtown Milwaukee, part of the renaissance that is happening in Westown, part of the renaissance happening on Wisconsin Avenue," Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson said.
Johnson added that the department store chain's commitment to downtown Milwaukee comes after a string of public and private investments on or near Wisconsin Avenue.
The Wisconsin Center convention space is expanding across the street, apartments continue to be built in the neighborhood, and Milwaukee Tool is opening an office to house hundreds of jobs on nearby West Michigan Street. The former Shops of Grand Avenue connected to Hub640 is attracting traffic through its 3rd St. Market Hall that opened in January, and also is leasing its office space to bring daytime workers back to the neighborhood.
Gass said the new downtown Milwaukee store is part of the chain's growth strategy. The company has close to 1,200 stores in the U.S. and has plans to build another 100 small-format stores of 35,000 square feet over the next four years.
"They all will have a smaller footprint than what we’ve traditionally built," she said.
Kohl's is also refreshing and modernizing its existing stores as it works to build out the Sephora partnership. Gass said the company is updating 600 stores in the upcoming weeks and 850 in the upcoming year.
The ground-floor retail space in Hub640 has been vacant since summer 2018 when its Boston Store closed and The Bon-Ton Stores Inc., which had its headquarters and hundreds of workers on the building’s upper floors, shut down its operations.
The more than 120-year-old building where Kohl’s is headed has undergone a transformation under North Wells Capital, which acquired it in 2017. Since Bon-Ton and Boston Store closed, the Chicago developer gutted its upper floors to become multi-tenant offices and has attracted several new tenants to repopulate the space. The 67,000-square-foot ground floor has remained empty as North Wells Capital sought retailers to lease it.