If you want to get to the heart of Hong Kong’s most creative – and hard to find – fashion stores, it’s time to get off the ground floor, write Bourree Lam

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The best upper-floor stores

Striking window displays and state-of-the-art flagship stores are all well and good, but if that’s the be-all and end-all of your shopping experience in Hong Kong, then you’re missing out on some of our city’s most bijou fashion gems. With the high rents and other costs associated with street-level properties, budding local designers and style-makers have long turned to upper-floor premises in commercial buildings from which to sell their wares.

Like many upper-floor stores, Salina Lam’s Satis Factory Vintage Emporium shows nothing but a third-floor window to the outside world. Obviously, not being on ground floor makes the already difficult task of attracting customers only harder. "Think about it," she says. "You have to look up and see the display from across the street. Then you have to cross the street and find the way up."

Hebe Ngai, manager of lingerie store Inducer Sexy acknowledges the same problem. “We’ll put the more sexy stuff in the window,” he says of their strategy to attract more shoppers into their third-floor lingerie haven.

Many second-floor shops are so small that they can seem crowded with just a couple of people in the store, and there’s usually just one employee (generally the manager or owner) on duty. Almost without exception, most owners have embraced their locations for the most practical of reasons: rent.

“The rent is quite expensive,” says Lawrence Chung of Evergreen, a skate clothing shop on Leighton Road, when asked about street-level properties. “It’s not suitable for a skate shop… here it’s half the rent for a bigger place.”

According to international property consulting firm Cushman & Wakefield, Causeway Bay ranks second in the world to New York’s 5th Avenue as the most expensive area for retail space in the world. Modestly sized ground floor shops in Causeway Bay typically cost between $100,000 and $200,000, depending on the street. This represents a nigh impossible amount for small business owners to raise on a monthly basis, and that's before factoring in multi-month deposits, renovations, and other fees peculiar to street-level stores. Upper floor shops, on the other hand, go for a fraction of the price: Ngai cites Inducer Sexy’s rent at “around $20,000”, and fees of more than $50,000 a month are exceptional.

Go for a building with a front gate similar to those found in apartment buildings and the prices drop still further, although this invariably means people have to rely on word-of-mouth to find new customers.

“It definitely beats paying $30,000 a month for a 300 square foot space,” says Edward Ho of Vogue Shoes, an exotic-skin accessory store located in a small residential building in Tsim Sha Tsui. “Rent is $11,000 and my business is still doing well." The entrance to Vogue’s building is totally innocuous, but Ho’s custom-made shoe shop has been around for more than 20 years, and he says that his regular customers and their friends have never had trouble locating him. In fact, he says he avoids advertising because he already has too many clients.

There are other perks to being on upper floors. The hard-to-find element helps create an air of mystique, and a sense of satisfaction when customers manage to track them down. For stores that want to maintain an atmosphere of discretion, such as lingerie boutiques, an upper-floor address is just the ticket. “With lingerie, it’s better to be on an upper floor,” says June Wong, supervisor and personal assistant to the owner of Angel Vee, a store carrying Japanese lingerie that overlooks Lockhart Road.

“If we were on the first floor, probably less people would come in,” agrees Ngai. “Our stuff is so sexy, some of our customers are shy and would definitely get embarrassed,” he says referring to Inducer Sexy’s racier stock.

For Chung of Evergreen, there’s also an element of maintaining an image that matches his clientele’s taste for subculture. “Our image is stuff that not many people can get. We’ve run this business in Hong Kong for 15 years – all the skateboarders know our name.” When asked if he would ever want to move to a street-level location, Chung answers in the negative, citing the fact he would have to change his business to adapt. “If I was on ground floor, I would have to sell more popular stuff,” he says.

Additional reporting from Tina Lee.

Read our other fashion features:
Build your own brand
How to be an INC
The best upper-floor stores