From November, shoppers heading to Berlin’s upmarket KaDeWe department store will get more than designer brands and premium beauty products.
As part of an ongoing process to make shopping more of an experience, KaDeWe is opening a 21,500-square-foot health, sports and wellness space on the fourth floor of the historic building in the center of the German capital.
In doing so, the German department store follows in the footsteps of the likes of Galeries Lafayette in Paris, Selfridges in London and Saks Fifth Avenue, which opened its now-defunct The Wellery back in 2017.
The new Berlin space features a studio for Lagree classes — the high-intensity, low-impact body workouts that have been a hit with celebrities like Jennifer Aniston and Kate Hudson in Los Angeles recently — by boutique Berlin brand Shapesty, as well as biohacking and longevity-boosting treatments from Frankfurt-based company Recover Society.
So customers could potentially come to the fourth floor in the morning to do a Lagree class, suggested Julie Gasperini, director of buying for KaDeWe group, one of the prime organizers of partners for the hub. Then they could head next door for recovery and relaxation before moving up to the store’s legendary sixth-floor food hall for brunch, then finally back down again to the third for a beauty treatment or two.
“One experience, in one place, under one roof,” Gasperini said at the Thursday morning press preview of the new hub.
Journalists were shown a Lagree demonstration in the Shapesty studio, the company’s third in Berlin, and given a tour of the exclusive sports brands stocked by KaDeWe, including Stronger from Sweden and Mercer Amsterdam as well as smaller Berlin-based brands like Wrstbhvr and Ante, which are partially inspired by the city’s nightclubs and streetwear, among other well-known brands like Fabletics, Skims and On.
There is also Recover Society’s space, which features everything from a hyperbaric oxygen therapy chamber to a low-lit space for breathing or movement classes and individual consultation rooms. Medical doctors and other experts will be on hand to advise potential clients about suitable treatments.
“We started off in hotels and that has worked very well,” Recover Society chief executive officer Nicolai Gropper told WWD. “But now many department stores want to create more space for customer experiences and that’s how we fit in.” The company is soon to expand to sites in Milan, London and Copenhagen too, he added.
Recover Society doesn’t own the equipment itself, as Gropper explained the business model. Instead the company brings together the gear, the expertise, the different partners and the space, Gropper said. Frequency is key to success so he’s hoping that KaDeWe’s well-heeled clientele — data from loyalty cards shows many visit once a week at least — will use Recover Society services up to three times a week and sign up for membership cards, which cost from 180 to 1,000 euros a month.
Gasperini told WWD the whole process, from the first discussions to the soft opening, has taken around 18 months. The biggest issues were figuring out how to get the futuristic fitness and recovery equipment into the 120-year-old historically protected building and how to connect as much power and running water as the new businesses needed, she said.