Italian designer Valentino Fashion Group SPA finally is in after eyeing South Coast Plaza for years.
“It’s not easy to get a spot in South Coast Plaza,” said Graziano de Boni, Valentino’s chief executive in the U.S.
The designer of Valentino and Hugo Boss clothes wasn’t settling for just any place at the Costa Mesa shopping center.
“It’s not easy to get the right spot in South Coast Plaza,” de Boni said in his native Italian accent.
Valentino is next to Chanel, near Nordstrom and across from Tiffany.
Valentino Fashion Group, which is working on its grand opening plans for South Coast Plaza, also is celebrating its new publicly traded status on Italy’s stock exchange.
The company recently was spun off to shareholders of former parent Marzotto SPA.
The last Valentino store to open in the U.S. was at the Forum Shops at Caesars in Las Vegas. Valentino has plans to add two U.S. stores per year. It now has 36 worldwide, including two stores in California, one in New York and three others on the East Coast.
Valentino’s next target: the Midwest.
Valentino stores are selling more watches, handbags, shoes, perfumes and other accessories, de Boni said.
“We didn’t even have watches three years ago,” he said.
Accessories are a way to get more people familiar with the Valentino name, de Boni said. And they bring nice profits for designers.
De Boni said he likes to convert people who don’t like to shop.
“I’m in the feel-good business,” he said.
A colleague of St. John Knits International Inc. boss Richard Cohen, de Boni declined to comment on Irvine-based St. John’s direction with its new model, Giselle Bundchen.
The Brazilian Bundchen replaces Kelly Gray, the company’s longtime face and daughter of the founders.
But de Boni said he appreciates the competition with St. John.
“I’m a great admirer of Richard Cohen,” he said.
On Target
Newport Beach entrepreneur Keith Jarrett’s invention soon will be sold on “Red Hot Shop,” an area of Target Corp.’s Web site that shows a few new products for one week at a time.
Jarrett’s AmberWatch is a stylish watch that kids wear to help prevent them from being abducted or sexually molested. If a child’s in trouble, he or she could trigger a 110-decibel alarm by pressing two buttons on either side of the watch.
Buyers for Target fast-tracked the watch, according to Jarrett. He said he sent a watch and a specification sheet to Target, and that was it.
From start to finish it took two weeks to seal the deal, Jarrett said. The watch is set to start selling in the Red Hot Shop on Aug. 15 and then move into the general Target.com site. If the product sells really well, it could make it to stores.
AmberWatch.com has been selling the watch since December.
The watch started shipping in May after a glitch in production was fixed. AmberWatch went through six manufacturers and many trips to China to find the right maker, Jarrett said. The problem was producing the high decibel level in a watch that didn’t weigh a lot, he said.
It also took time to get the engineering done right: “It’s one thing to engineer something. It’s another to engineer something for manufacturing,” Jarrett said. “This product had to be perfect.”
The AmberWatch markets the product through Amber Foundation, a company set up to offer child safety educational programs to schools. AmberWatch just finished training the Miami Dade district school police on its “Be Safe” program.
“This is one of those things you can’t say no to,” Jarrett said.
The idea for the watch came to Jarrett after he temporarily lost his daughter in a toy store in San Juan Capistrano, he said.
“It totally freaked me out,” Jarrett said.
Then he relayed the story to his brother, a police officer. His brother came up with the name “AmberWatch,” which comes from 9-year-old Amber Hagerman, who was kidnapped and killed in Texas in 1996.
“When he said the name, it just clicked,” Jarrett said.
The next day, Jarrett bought the domain name, amberwatch.com, and got a lawyer to trademark the name.
AmberWatch is in conversations with a grocery store chain, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and other retailers, he said.
Fletcher Widens Lead
Fletcher Jones Motorcars opened up its lead as the top U.S. Mercedes-Benz dealer for the first half of the year.
The latest numbers show the Newport Beach Mercedes dealer beat its next closest competitor, Mercedes-Benz of Laguna Niguel,by 16%.
Fletcher leads No. 3 Ray Catena Mercedes-Benz of Edison, N.J., by more than double.
The dealership on Newport’s Back Bay sold 2,877 new vehicles and 1,126 used ones for a record of $274 million in sales through June.
Fletcher Jones sells 11% of all Mercedes-Benz from San Diego to Santa Barbara, according to general manager Garth Blumenthal.
Blumenthal attributes the higher sales to younger buyers driving off lower-priced models and more people from outside the county buying cars.
The dealership also is known as somewhat of a social club, with its popular Saturday morning car washes, coffee shop and TV lounge.
Fletcher will have more competition soon as Caliber Motors in Anaheim gets set to break ground on its new dealership in Anaheim Hills. A Lexus dealership is planned across the way from Fletcher in Newport Beach in the next year.
Local Mercedes-Benz registrations are up 8.1% through May, compared to the same period last year, according to the Orange County Automobile Dealers Association’s Orange County Auto Outlook report.
