Founded in 2003, owner Farshad Ashid’s business savvy means Standard now has two Atlanta locations and a steadily growing customer base. While Standard maintains that the product should shine, one of their stores has a wall-to-wall floor covering of stadium turf.


Frank151: Tell us about the history of your store.
Standard Atlanta: This August Standard Atlanta is actually going to be seven years old. Basically, as consumers ourselves, we started up because we were looking for certain brands that we couldn't see in the market. And every time we tried to find particular brands, no boutiques were selling them. My background has always been in retail. I was GM at Gianni Versace stores in Atlanta for years and I'd already gotten out of retail. I was kinda having the itch again to get back into it, so once we realized this kind of store was somewhat nonexistent in Atlanta, we decided to look into it and see if it would be a feasible, viable business. Once we crunched the numbers, we realized it was. So for about a year we did some research, tried to find the right location and in August of 2003, we opened our doors at the first location. We have two locations in Atlanta. We opened the second location about 15 months ago in Lennox Square, which is like the main, high-end mall in the city.  

F151: Were there any other shops that inspired you?
SA: No, not really. I mean look, I'm somewhat inspired by everything I see and everywhere I go to be honest. It's one of those things where I take a little bit of inspiration whether I'm at a boutique in New York, whether I'm at a boutique in LA or what have you. We never wanted to say, “OK, this is who we're going to model ourselves on exactly based on research and travel,” but we'd see bits and pieces here and there that we'd certainly thought were great ideas. Some of it we try to incorporate, some we tried and it didn't work. But we try to be as original as possible although you always get inspiration from people who've been in the business longer than you have.

F151: How would you describe the design of your store? What was the inspiration behind it and what type of environment are you trying to create?
SA: The original store has a very clean, minimalist look. It’s got a wire hanging system, all custom, and a super clean shoe wall. A lot of products we carry are colorful and bright so we didn't want to over-clutter. We didn't want the theme or the concept of the store to compete with the clothing. We want the product to be the star. The second store, we wanted to get a little more creative and try some new ideas. We have these huge comic cels on the walls at the Lennox location. On the floor, we decided, “Hey, why don't we try something that's never been done before?” so we brought actual turf into the store. The entire store floor is covered from wall to wall with actual stadium turf. Something a little different, kinda nutty.

F151: How did you decide on your location? How important has the location been?
SA: Very, very, very important. At the time we opened our first location it was like, a coffee house, us and about four art galleries. So it was a cool vibe, it was a neat vibe. And the thing that was interesting, was that the coffee house was the go-to spot in Atlanta, especially for late night. If you went out to dinner, at the end of it you'd end up at this spot. They were open till four in the morning, drinks, dessert, what have you. So this place literally had an hour wait to get a table, pretty much any time past 10, 11 o'clock.  So when we came here, we decided, “Let’s kill two birds with one stone. When's the foot traffic in the area and what hasn't been done in Atlanta? A late night boutique.” So the first two and a half, three years we were open, weekdays we stayed open till 11 and weekends, we'd stay open till two in the morning. It was a crazy concept. People would come in and go, “Oh wow, you guys are still open?”  Then it's like, “I'm still waiting for my table, why not start shopping?” So the crowd was definitely our clientele. A hip, younger crowd. College students, young professionals, city kids. It absolutely was a perfect marriage. Eventually over time, as their business died down late night and we established our clientele and didn't need foot traffic, we shaved our hours back. But we're still open late, we're open till nine for weekdays, which for a non-mall store is still late and then on the weekends, we're open till 11pm.      

F151: What brands do you carry, and which are your top sellers?
SA: We have a nice mix of brands. We do a lot of collections from G-Star to Gant to Public School, Play Cloths, The Hundreds, Stussy, Stussy Deluxe, 10 Deep, Billionaire Boys Club, Ice Cream. BBC and Ice Cream along with G-Star are probably our best sellers. With footwear, we carry Nike, Puma, Generic Surplus, Clae, Supra. A nice mixture of that as well too. 

F151: What brands or specific products are you excited about for Spring / Summer 2010?
SA: I'm really, really stoked about the Billionaire Boys Club / Ice Cream collection coming out. I think it's going to be fantastic, what we've seen is amazing. As far as footwear, we picked up the Bass Weejuns by Mark McNairy, those are going to be unbelievable. We try different stuff, we take some risks. Bring some new things into the store that are somewhat unexpected for a store at our level to carry.

F151: Are there any trends in fashion that you're excited about, both for Spring / Summer 2010 and beyond?
SA: Denim is making a comeback which is nice. I'm a fan of the workwear that's popping up. If it doesn't get beaten to death like everything else it'll be fantastic. I love that hard-bottomed shoes are coming back in. Boots, work boots, military boots. Stoked about that.

F151: How has social networking (blogs, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) affected retail for your store and retail in general?
SA: It's revolutionized the business. We opened right around when MySpace was getting big. We actually had a Friendster account if you can imagine. A lot of people will read this and say, “What the hell is that?!” But yeah, we opened with a Friendster account and eventually we opened a MySpace account and for the first three years we were open, that was one of the major ways for us to communicate, aside from direct contact with our customers. We'd get product, we'd take pictures, we'd put it up on MySpace, send out a bulletin and the next thing you know, we'd get calls and phone orders. So that was a big, big thing in those first couple of years. Eventually we set up our website and blog which is fairly thriving part of our business. We still do Facebook and Twitter and it's all attached and intertwined with our website. Every time we do a new post on our website, a tweet goes out about it and we get business from it sometime.

F151: What about ecommerce? What effect has online sales had on your store and on the broader retail industry?
SA: Ecommerce is an interesting thing because in our world — so to speak — we've seen a lot of resistance from a lot of brands because they didn't want to dilute anything. But with the loss of so many brick and mortar accounts over the last two years, they're starting to rethink that strategy. We've been approached by certain brands that were so anti us selling anything online, now coming back and saying, “Hey… You sure you don't want to launch an online store and sell our products online?” So that's been a game-changer. Unfortunately, this horrible economy that’s put so many out of business is forcing brands to kinda rethink that concept of, “No, no we can't be online, we can't have an online presence.”

F151: What future plans for your store do you have that you’d like to share?
SA: The online store is one of them — we should be launching an online store within the next couple of months which we're excited about. We are certainly interested in going into new markets. I couldn't off the top of my head tell you which ones, but yeah we would love to do another three to five stores over the next few years if possible. If it's right. We're not really big on how many stores. We're much more quality over quantity. It took us five-and-a-half years just to open our second location. But we think it's the right time for us to grow. We're starting to have a little bit of a better presence online. And also in other cities and other markets people are starting to hear about us and know about us, which is quite humbling actually. But at the same time it's a nice thing to know, because now you know you might be able to go into other markets and set up shop and hopefully perform.

F151: What Scion promotional items have been the most popular with your staff and with customers?
SA: I thought the socks were bad as hell! The Scion socks were genius. The headphones were great. For me, personally, the music, the CDs, those are fantastic.  There's some outstanding music put on these CDs and people love them.

F151: Do you have a favorite Scion music compilation? Did any of the compilations make it into your store’s music rotation?
SA: Absolutely. We put it on our playlist.

F151: Can you explain the cult following for Scion socks?
SA: I think they're really good. It was so different. You'd never expect to see that so everyone kinda chuckled, but everyone wanted a pair.