Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
hotel gift shops going local
Artisans’ wares replace kitschy mass-produced key chains and T-shirts
THEY have no sombreros at La Caty 555, the gift shop tucked inside Mexico’s new Live Aqua Urban
Resort in San Miguel de Allende. But a dozen or so mod, wide-brimmed straw and felt hats hang on the boutique’s gray stone back wall, seemingly left by some stylish, latterday Frida Kahlo.
Like everything else in the shop – leather bomber jackets trimmed with bright embroidery panels, lavastone salt cellars, wooden skull-motif trays in neon hues – the hats are “hecho en Mexico” but feel far from stereotypical souvenirs.
“Contemporary Mexican design is booming,” says Michelle Galante, the shop’s owner and buyer. “Newer brands are having a blast taking old painting, sewing and weaving methods and doing them in fresh ways.”
She assembled the collection for the new property in the central Mexican travel hot spot using up-and-coming designers, lesserknown artisans and a cadre of smallbatch botanical lotion producers.
Like La Caty 555, many hotel gift shops have been moving away from selling kitschy snow globes, “I Love (insert destination)” T-shirts and paperback books. They’re stocking or commissioning locally made merchandise.
“One of the overarching themes in the hotel industry today is being in touch with the local area,” says Jan Freitag, senior vice-president of lodging insights at hospitality data analysis firm STR. “It’s the idea that people don’t want a beige box, they want to feel like something can only happen in this specific hotel. Gift shops can be an extension of that.”
This means that hoteliers have a financial interest in making any in-house retail memorable, different and reflective of the surroundings.
Take the new Omni Louisville Hotel in Kentucky. There, just off a grand lobby with a ceiling mimicking a stylised bourbon barrel, the Miller & Co shop deals in leather belts and bags from nearby workshop Clayton & Crume and locally poured, mint-scented candles in – what else? – metal julep cups.
The best gift shops combine retail curation with brand narration. By hawking tailored-to-the-spot stuff (Hawaiian table salt in Waikiki, African wax-print jackets in Cape Town), hotels can exemplify a destination and unspool a story about the property’s target audience.
“A hotel shop used to be like a convenience store, but now I think it’s much more about sourcing local goods that speak of that destination or finding cool, local brands to partner with,” says Deanna Ting, senior hospitality editor at travel media and analysis firm Skift.
Detroit’s new Shinola Hotel has taken this further and inverted the bed-and-browse concept by opening a whole hotel inspired by the Motor City wristwatch, electronics and leather goods brand. Guests stay in rooms with Shinola wood-andleather-trimmed turntables and retro alarm clocks that they can purchase in the shop downstairs.
Casa Mae in Lagos, Portugal, has done the same: guests stay in rooms decorated with locally made textiles, pottery and art, which they can also snap up in its Loja shop.
Flower-arranging and ceramics classes are also held on site.
Lodgings in destinations with craft cultures have a natural advantage when it comes to creating distinctive boutiques. They’ve simply got more homegrown merchandise and artisans to draw from.
In the spirit of farm-to-table dining, they’re embracing a workshop-to-gift-shop ethos.
But instead of selling the same handicrafts you’d dig up in Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar or at any number of night markets across Asia, hotels often try to put a modern spin on traditional methods. The South Asian-meets-Western IDLI boutique just outside Narain Niwas Palace Hotel in Jaipur, India, trades in tiedyed duvets, men’s skinny pants in block-print cotton and ethereal silk dresses, all whipped up by local weavers and dyers but designed by French expat Thierry Journo.
Other hotels market a combo of trendy and traditional items, such as the Safari Shop at Angama Mara lodge in Kenya’s Great Rift Valley, which stocks African-made products such as peacock-feather-trimmed pashminas by Nairobi designer Anna Trzebinski and Maaisai wooden staffs wrapped in a rainbow of beads. The latter are created on-site by a quartet of tribal women in traditional shuka robes, who gather for work around a long table every day, singing as they work. Visitors can join in, too.
“I think they love taking home their own beaded memory,” says resort owner Nicky Fitzgerald. Plus, when visitors witness indigenous crafting, it drives home how much buying local helps support the culture.