Downtown CDC | Pittsburgh Fashion Week
320 Ft. Duquesne Blvd., Suite 4A
Pittsburgh, PA 15222
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Downtown Pittsburgh Has A Bright Future |
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I am fortunate to be a resident in Downtown Pittsburgh. People like me, who are also fortunate to live here, can walk to all three sporting venues. We have the best theater district of any city not named New York or London. During the weekends before the Omicron variant, when things appeared to have died down, the restaurant scene was back to pre-COVID levels in the evenings.
Seeing everyone out and about always made me smile. The number of people walking around created a vibrancy that is contagious. So, keeping all this in mind, the questions that beg to be asked are, what will Downtown look like post-COVID? Essentially, how long will it take to get that vibrancy back?
I believe there are multiple reasons why we can bounce back quickly. Below are 7 reasons:
1. Desire to socialize
Human beings need to socialize. It creates a healthy state of mind. People have been isolated for two years now and just like the last pandemic 100 years ago when people are inside their homes for such a long period of time you want to get out as much as possible as long as you feel safe. Even though we have seen a surge of new variant cases, vaccinated people feel mild symptoms compared to others. This has created a more comfortable safety level so people are out more. Remember, The Spanish Flu was followed by The Roaring Twenties.
2. Great Restaurants
Pittsburgh has become one of the top food cities in the world. We have some of the best chefs in the world who own restaurants here. This recent phenomenon has caught the eye of the world. Zagat's named Pittsburgh the #1 restaurant city in the world just a couple of years ago.
3. Walkability
Whether it is sports venues, theaters, restaurants, or music, you can walk from one end of downtown to the other to enjoy some or all of the above without a car or public transportation. Very few cities can say that.
4. Residential Growth
There are more than a few residential development plans in the pipeline. With multiple conversions from commercial properties to residential, Downtown will see a growth of residents that is unprecedented for Pittsburgh. This influx will move us forward in creating a true 18-hour downtown.
5. Affordability
Pittsburgh as a whole, Downtown in specific, is still extremely affordable and a great value purchase. One can make the argument that the lifestyle here is as good or better than just about any city in this hemisphere. When you compare prices to other metropolitan centers, downtown properties are a great buy.
6. The Theater District
It cannot be stated highly enough how great our theater district is. Whether it is a broadway show, an independent small venue, comedy clubs, or magic, it is all right here. I have been to many cities and I believe Pittsburgh has the best theater district in the country outside of New York.
7. Stakeholders and Government
We need our leaders to have the political will to take us to the next level. Downtown is unique, in that, we are the living room of our city. Tourists and business people see us first and most times that is all they see. It is imperative to have a great core in order to have residents consider moving here and to get businesses to invest in our city. I believe that this leadership already exists with current government leaders. Mayor Gainey will add to that by bringing fresh ideas and a determination to move us forward. The future looks bright.
These are just a few reasons but I believe we will get back to where we were, before the pandemic, in two years. What really has me excited though, is that we can create a spectacular city in three to five years. In future editions, we will dig deeper into some of the things that have to be put in place to make this grand vision happen.
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Save the Date: VisitPITTSBURGH's 2022 Annual Meeting |
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Mark your calendar for VisitPITTSBURGH’s 2022 Annual Meeting as they reflect on 2021 and share their plans to continue to rebuild and rebound the travel and tourism economy for the region.
10 a.m. - Press Conference
2:30 p.m. - Business Meeting
3 p.m. - Annual Meeting
4-5:30 p.m. - Networking Social
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Pittsburgh Restaurant Week Returns |
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After all the turkey basting and cookie baking during the holidays, it’s time to let Pittsburgh’s great chefs cook for you. They’re working incredibly hard to power through the ongoing challenges presented by the pandemic and need our support more than ever. With fixed-price multi-course meals and special offers, the weeklong event explores the theme of New Dishes for the New Year. From Fujiya Ramen, The Commoner and Carmella’s Plates and Pints to McCormick & Schmick’s, Paris 66 and Station (the list keeps growing) — there’s a flavor for every palate and craving. It goes on January 10th through the 15th.
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Nordstrom Reviewing Possible Rack Spinoff |
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Nordstrom Inc. is reportedly reviewing options for its off-price Rack division.
The department store chain has hired AlixPartners to help it review a possible spinoff of Rack into a separate company, reported Bloomberg. The business has struggled to return to pre-pandemic levels. For the quarter ended Oct.30, Nordstrom reported that Rack sales fell 8% compared to the third quarter of 2019. The retailer said it was “taking action” to improve performance at Rack, including optimizing inventory levels, better balancing price points and increasing brand awareness.
“We are not satisfied at all with our Rack business as clearly our recovery is lagging what we think it should be,” CEO Erik Nordstrom told analysts on the company’s third-quarter earnings call.
Nordstrom is not the only department store company reviewing its business. Macy’s has tapped AlixPartners to evaluate its online operations at the urging of activist shareholder Jana Partners, which valued the company’s digital business at about $14 billion, the Bloomberg report said.
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Artist and Designer Stew Frick Brings New Collection to PFW |
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Pittsburgh is particularly known for being the "City of Bridges," but it is also known for its immense number of hills. Those hills are where designer Stew Frick derives inspiration from.
A self-taught painter and artist, Frick implement brushwork and clothing to create a vibrant assortment of designs. “[My] work imports a heavy element of storytelling and a combination of artistic mediums and methodologies to create lush, wearable art,” said Frick.
Not only do the scenic surroundings of Pittsburgh inspire them, but folklore and storytelling also remain at the forefront of many pieces. Their 2020 Collection, Forlorn Moon, even focuses heavily on the realm of fantasy.
“In essence, this is the story of a moon, who is forlorn. In a short, childbook-esque format, I tell the story of a moon who rises into the sky, feeling sad due to its solitude. Unfortunately, despite its friends arriving to try and cheer the moon up, it doesn't want company either, and seems to be content just floating along, marinating in melancholy. The clothing collection itself is a variety of looks into the story - some a direct narrative or presentation of the events as-told, and some as a peek into the deeper psyche and fears of the moon itself, attempting to show why it may be so unwilling to accept help from those around it,” explained Frick.
While Frick is a returning designer to Pittsburgh Fashion Week, the excitement about a collection reveal continues to feel like a new beginning. Frick exemplifies that quarantine gave them time to hone their skills, making their returning appearance even more memorable. “Showcasing my collection at Pittsburgh Fashion Week presents an exciting challenge to create a concise and recognizable style within my style which often relies on its ability to be different in every piece, and I always love a challenge!” exclaimed Frick.
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Champagne Shortage Starts to Bite |
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The much-vaunted Champagne drought of 2021 is real – and it's starting to show in the retail sector.
The headlines have been starkly predicting a global Champagne shortage and the data suggests that's exactly what we are now experiencing.
After years of fluctuating sales and exports, Champagne has had the brakes applied this year, with fewer retailers showing fewer offers for the category across the globe.
Year on year, Champagne offers have declined by 6.4 percent since December 15, 2021. That number is all the more concerning for Champagne producers given that the figures for the previous years had shown the number of Champagne offers had grown by 40 percent between 2017 and 2020.An offer is counted when a single retailer has a single vintage of a single bottle of a wine for sale, so the total offers a wine has is the number of different vintages (and different size formats) of that wine on sale at different retailers across the world. And when it comes to Champagne offers, the data doesn't make for pleasant reading.
The so-called drought appears to be the result of Champagne becoming a victim of its own massive growth and the fickleness of the post-Covid wine market.
While wine generally did well in the early part of the global lockdown, Champagne and other sparkling wine sales plummeted. This prompted the Champagne authorities, the Comité Champagne, to cut permitted yields for 2020.
In the second half of last year, demand began to grow and has continued since, the result of new markets, spikes in demand and not enough stock. Obviously, this is hitting the smaller producers hard, as they have less wine sitting in reserve to put into the market. However, our data shows that the big name brands – the wines with plenty of stock in reserve – are also struggling.
The 10 wines with the most offers are:
It's an unsurprisingly familiar list, but what is strange is the sharp drop in the number of offers for each of these wines compared to last December.
Not one wine on the list is less than 10 percent down on the number of offers compared to last year. In some cases, the number of offers is striking; Moët's Brut Imperial, the world's biggest-selling Champagne, has 25.4 percent fewer offers than last year; Dom Pérignon's offer numbers fell by 23.75 percent; Veuve Clicquot has seen a 31.8 percent drop.
The corollary of this supply bottleneck is that prices are also doing some strange things. The median prices of the wines on the list above have mostly come down – albeit slightly. This is a reflection of the fact that these large brands have enough stock available to keep their usual price points. For the more "prestige" cuvées, however, prices have begun to rise – alarmingly so, from a consumer perspective.
Krug Vintage Brut, for example, has seen a swift increase in price in the past three months. At the end of September, its global average retail price was $345 and currently it is $427, a rise of 23.8 percent in a matter of weeks. And it's not alone. The Jacques Selosse Millésime had a global average retail price of $1225 in September and now it sits at $1930, a rise of 57 percent.
And, while Dom Pérignon has held its price steady, the house's Plénitude P2 cuvée saw a 37.9 percent rise in its global average price from $3592 in September to its current $4953, a huge increase in less than three months. If you think that's bad, check out Charles Heidsieck's Champagne Charlie – in September you could get a bottle for a global average price of $713; today it sits at $1334, a whopping rise of 87 percent.
Overall, these are trying times for the Champenois. The 2021 harvest was devastated by frost, so there won't be too much excess wine floating around from the latest vintage, either. The lesson from the data this Christmas is a simple one: if you see a Champagne you like on sale, buy it straight away.
Otherwise it could end up either out of stock or out of your price range.
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Crumbl Cookies to Open its 326th Store in Four Years |
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Two cousins from Utah who struggled for years before landing upon the milk chocolate chip cookie recipe that made their cookie shop one of the fastest-growing in the country will open their 326th store at The Levee District in East Peoria. It will be their fourth location in Illinois and their first in the central region of the state.
The Crumbl Cookies shop in Logan, Utah, opened by Jason McGowan and Sawyer Hemsley in 2017 with just that one cookie, but soon succeeded in adding several others. The store became known for weekly rotating four or five different cookies into its menu, all of which can be purchased in Crumbl’s signature pink box. Four years later, McGowan and Helmsley had stores in 36 states.
“Crumbl Cookies will bring a new and unique bakery option to the area and we’re thrilled that The Levee District was chosen as the first location for Crumbl in Central Illinois," said A.T. Toroyan, VP and director of real estate for Cullinan Properties, owner and operator of The Levee District.
Aside from selections such as the Christmas Birthday Cake and the Peppermint Bark cookies, the cousins peg their success to showmanship. Customers entering Crumbl shops see their cookies being mixed, balled, baked, and dressed in real-time.
Crumbl’s expansion was quickened by an aggressive social media strategy. Its app is ranked in the Top 10 for food and drink daily downloads in the iOS store according to App Annie, ahead of Subway and Instacart.
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Chipotle to Open First Drive-Thru Only Restaurant |
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Chipotle’s evolution has felt the digital pull for some time now. It’s a process that began ahead of COVID-19, most notably with pickup shelves and the rapid installation of second-make lines to serve a fast-growing off-premises business.
On Thursday, the fast-casual unveiled its most vivid manifestation yet of this shifting landscape—a “Chipotlane Digital Kitchen,” which features a walk-up window and no dining room or front line. Set to open in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, later in December, the store is smaller than traditional Chipotlanes (the entirely digital, order-ahead drive-thru windows that have proliferated the brand in recent years) and boasts a kitchen equipped with a make-line dedicated to digital orders placed through the Chipotle app and the chain’s website, as well as marketplace partners. Consumers and delivery drivers collect digital orders through the Chipotlane drive-thru or walk-up window. There’s also a patio for guests to sit and eat.
“Chipotlanes are a key growth strategy for the brand,” Tabassum Zalotrawala, Chipotle’s chief development officer, said in a statement. “Our portfolio of approximately 300 Chipotlanes perform with the highest margins across the board, so we continue to evolve our restaurant design with formats such as the Chipotlane Digital Kitchen to best suit our growing digital business.”
Chipotlanes, which don’t have the traditional menu board of a quick-serve drive-thru (guests order in advance), launched in early 2018 and are opening with about 15 percent higher sales compared to non-Chipotlanes. It’s why the brand dedicated a significant chunk of current and future development to the model.
Chipotle customers can also order at a walk-up window and eat on the patio.
There are roughly 3,000 Chipotles today, with a long-term aim of 6,000 in North America. To date, the brand reconfigured 12 existing stores to feature the digital-order pickup lane, with these units seeing an increase in sales as more diners choose the convenient access channel, the company said.
Chipotle opened 41 locations in Q3. Of those, 36 featured a Chipotlane. As of mid-October, there were more than 110 restaurants under construction. The company expects to finish the fiscal calendar with north of 200 new restaurants—75 percent with the order-ahead pickup setup.
Beyond its ability to open up accessibility and present another convenient outlet, Chipotlanes continue to prove a powerful profitability driver.
The chain’s highest-margin transaction—digital pickup orders—are gaining traction of late, CEO Brian Niccol said in Q3. It represented slightly more than half of digital business in the third quarter. Naturally, this is one pulsing reason the brand is dedicating 75 percent-plus of growth to Chipotlanes given the high cost of delivery, both to the brand and to consumers, who are already paying 9–10 percent more for Chipotle items these days.
Niccol also noted that internal numbers show Chipotle is getting food from order to guest in less than 10 minutes. It was 12 minutes a couple of quarters ago. That’s only going to improve as more Chipotlanes enter the system.
As of September 30, there were 284 of them, including 12 conversions and eight relocations. Margin is higher because sales are, and also due to efficiency. The digital business at Chipotle is usually 10–15 percent better, meaning it’s closer to 55 percent of the mix at Chipotlanes.
With an incremental investment cost of $75,000–$85,000, it’s “by far, a superior return,” CFO Jack Hartung said in Q3. He also provided a hint to Thursday’s announcement: “What we are experimenting with though is a smaller footprint with a Chipotlane, where we might be able to go into a seen location. And the location would be where you've got two restaurants already. They could be very, very high-volume restaurants and there just isn't really enough room to economically put the third restaurant in between those two.”
What this suggests is the Chipotlane Digital Kitchen will allow the brand to not only target fresh markets for growth but to reevaluate what it once considered saturated. These stores have the potential to place multiple Chipotles where the company felt it could only have one before. Another path to that 6,000 figure.
Chipotle outlined a goal earlier in the year to reach 250 openings per calendar within the near future, something expected to unfold across a combination of expanding reach while also infilling mature markets with digital-first designs built to extract more dollars in areas.
Put another way, it’s Chipotle’s sudden flexibility to pivot to a digital proposition or an on-store proposition.
The brand also debuted a digital-only store in November just outside the gate of the military academy in Highland Falls, New York. The difference is this store, while digital-only, didn’t feature a Chipotlane as the Ohio one will. Still, it could fit into college towns and other nontraditional markets, Zalotrawala told QSR.
BTIG analyst Peter Saleh previously predicted Chipotle could have 1,000 Chipotlane locations through new builds alone by 2025, representing about 30 percent of domestic units. He also noted runway for “several hundred” retrofits as roughly 80 percent of the brand’s existing stores is free-standing or end-cap sites.
And the numbers back all of it. Chipotle’s revenue increased 21.9 percent in Q3 to a record $2 billion, thanks in large part to same-store sales growth of 15.1 percent. Digital sales lifted 8.6 percent and accounted for 42.8 percent of the business. The operating margin was 12.3 percent, an increase from 6.7 percent, and the restaurant-level operating margin was 23.5 percent, 400 basis points higher.
In Q2, digital represented a $916 million business for Chipotle. When the chain collected $262 million in digital sales in Q2 2019, it marked a 99 percent year-over-year rise and was more than it produced in all of 2016.
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