technologies through a store app that will employ technologies like analytics and geolocation to target customers depending on how physically close they are to the store. “We’ll also be focused on your location once you come into the store,” Alexander says. “There will be the ability for product to be brought to you if you’re sitting in the restaurant area or you can text the staff,” he says.
The first Neighborhood Goods store is scheduled to open this fall in Plano, TX, located north of Dallas, and feature 13 brands, which will have a range of durations, the company said. Neighborhood Goods will either charge them rent, which Alexander says would be far below typical retail leases, or take a portion of sales.
Each store within a Neighborhood Goods store would largely feature apparel and housewares, with the odd lifestyle or art-related product thrown in, he says. “Some brands won’t want to sell anything; they may want to create a small cooking class or sponsor a reading area.”
A year ago, Alexander left Edition Collective, an e-retail business he had sold in 2016 to men’s e-commerce shop, Q Fifty One, a Houston-based brick-and-mortar retailer. (Three months prior to the sale, Alexander made staffing cuts and faced being locked out of Edition’s premises because of delinquent rent, according to D Magazine at the time.) Edition had been formed out of two businesses, Need and Foremost, which Alexander had founded in Dallas. Edition’s focus was emphasizing the story behind a brand, product, or designer as a way to better connect with shoppers.
But about a year ago, Alexander says he met Mark Masinter, president of Open Realty Advisors in Dallas, who, among other projects, helped Apple roll out its retail stores. The two began sketching out a retail concept that has become Neighborhood Goods. Alexander left Q Fifty One for the new startup, which officially launched in August.
“If you think about what we did with Edition Collective, with the focus on editorially driven commerce, we saw that that works,” he says. “This takes some of those threads and carries it further.”
