Ace & Tate's move into the high street is a 'natural extension'

Making the jump from the digital realm to the physical bricks & mortar is not always a smooth transition for retailers who have established their business online. However, for Mark de Lange, the man behind fashionable eyewear label Ace & Tate, the step from online to offline has been as seamless as possible. Over the past year, Ace & Tate has opened various of pop-up stores across the Netherlands and Germany, and this July saw the opening of the brand's first flagship store in Amsterdam.

For a label which was founded online, moving into a tangible space on the high street felt like "a natural extension." FashionUnited took a moment to catch up with de Lange the day after Ace & Tate opened its first standalone pop-up store in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. “The opening of the pop-up store was awesome,” reveals de Lange. "We mostly invited people from within our network to the opening in Rotterdam and a lot of them turned up and brought their friends, so it was great."

Ace & Tate experiments with offline retailing through Pop-up shops

Located next to the new Urban Outfitters pop-up in Rotterdam, de Lange admits that the location found them rather than the other way around. “It was dumb luck, really.” After opening Ace & Tate’s debut flagship store in Amsterdam, the founder of the affordable eyewear company was open to looking into other pop-up concepts in new cities.

"We believe firmly in testing everything we do. That's probably because we are an online company, so it makes it easier to do so. When the opportunity to open a pop-up store in Rotterdam came along, we saw it as a good way to test if Rotterdam would be a good market for us to open a store. As rental contracts for stores are pretty long, we decided that it would be best to first test the waters and see how it goes and if everyone is happy then we will pursue a more central location."

The pop-up store’s interior was designed by the same firm who created the store space for Ace & Tate’s pop-ups in Amsterdam and Berlin, namely New Tendency. “We have a very easy working relationship with New Tendency - they're great and I think they make awesome stuff that fits with our brand and it just feels right,” notes de Lange. In the past Ace & Tate also worked with Occult Studio to design its flagship store, to ensure the customers are able to enjoy the optimal brand experience in person.

Ace & Tate's foray into the high street is not seen as a 'radical departure' from original concept

The new pop-up store also offers free consultations from an in-house optician. "We saw that when we do not do measurements ourselves and let the customers go to their own optician, that we can't control the complete in-store experience. It takes away from the whole purchasing journey in my opinion, and we want our customers to have the full Ace & Tate experience. So that's why we started experimenting with eye-tests in our old head office, and the responses were great so we decided to extend that to our own stores."

Focusing on offering the best customer service they can, is another reason why de Lange decided to make the move from the online world into the physical with Ace & Tate. Although the brand first started out as an online retailer, Ace & Tate worked with several independent boutiques to showcase the frames available. “Even though we have always been online first, we were never 100 percent 'pure-play online'. I would say that this is just a natural extension of that - it doesn't feel like a radical departure from our concept."

Although nestling themselves onto the high street may not feel like a big change, store location is still key to Ace & Tate. "As a brand we feel mostly at home between more independent boutiques, so that would be where we would look for a more permanent store. But it's been an interesting experiment looking at what it does and how it makes us feel to be on the high street. It's very different. It's actually crazy to see my brand opposite of Zara and next to Urban Outfitters - that was not something I would have expected two years ago. However, the response so far has been really positive."

Although the company behind Ace & Tate has evolved, the brand remains the same

In fact, the public response has been so encouraging that de Lange is considering opening another pop-up store or two by the end of the year, but the locations have yet to be discussed, although it is likely that one will be in the Netherlands and the other in Germany. “We are focusing on the Netherlands and Germany right now and learning as much as possible there about what works and fits with the brand. And once we feel that we have the formula down, then we will roll it out to other countries.”

Ace & Tate currently has an online store in UK, which was launched in late 2013. Is de Lange considering testing the label’s pop-up concept overseas anytime soon? “The UK is a territory we are very aware of, but we are not actively pursuing the opening of pop-up stores there just yet,” he explains. “It is a market we are looking at for the future, but it may not necessarily be the first market we move into physically after Germany."

Since the brand was first launched in 2013, the company has grown from roughly 18 employees to over 60 plus employees. But de Lange maintains that Ace & Tate’s values and price will not be changing in spite of more competitors stepping into the market. "The company itself has changed radically over the past year and half, but the brand itself is very much what it used to be. We make eyewear we like and we collaborate with who we think is interesting and fits our brand. We moved to a new office, opened new stores, so that has changed significantly. But the brand itself I would describe it as more of a brand evolution than a revolution."

Ace & Tate not afraid of competition online or offline

Although some brands would become a little nervous by the emergence of competitors on the market offering similar products, de Lange sees the launch of companies such as Loek.nl as a positive effect of Ace & Tate."It basically educates the market and the consumer than it is not necessary to pay that much for good-quality glasses. It also lets them know they can buy glasses in a different way instead of going through the traditional channels. So I am not afraid of competition." He also stresses that the price of the glasses will not change.

"We may experiment with different price points for different products, still within the eyewear field but with different materials and maybe different lense types but we would never change our core price of 98 euros. We maintain that transparency is key, so we will always maintain our transparent price point as well. We will not start up-selling or something."