He Knows What Men Want (to Buy)

All was going as Chris Green had hoped.

It was Friday afternoon at Ven. Space, a month-old men’s boutique in South Brooklyn, and Mr. Green, the shop’s owner, was swimming in shoppers.

Dressed in his usual uniform of earth tones and black, Mr. Green assisted a guy trying on a to-the-waist chore coat. (“This is definitely the right size,” he advised.) Moments later, a woman entered the long shoe box of a space, declaring that she lived in the neighborhood and was wondering what was going on here. Some fuzzy sweaters on the shop’s ash-blond table caught her eye. Over at the register two men in near-matching slender chinos were paying for their purchases.

Mr. Green picked up a call — his personal cellphone is the shop’s listed number on Google. The caller asked if he had any black loafers from the French label Lemaire in a size 11. They sell for $620. Mr. Green assured him he did, and they’ll be set aside for him that afternoon.

“It’s been a nice response,” Mr. Green said, coming up for air. That may be an understatement. In four visits to the store this month there was almost always a transaction occurring at any given time.

Mr. Green would not share sales numbers, saying only that so far “business has been good.” High ticket items — a $3,300 leather trucker jacket from Taiga Takahashi and a $3,430 leather zip-up from Auralee are long sold out. Mr. Green said he has sold so much product in the short few weeks the store has been open that he has had to reorder much of his stock. “We immediately went into chase mode after the first week,” he said.

A Real Risk

New York’s shopping landscape is a graveyard of bankrupt institutions once seen as too big to fail — from Barneys to Opening Ceremony down to Filene’s Basement. Widen the aperture to online shopping, and things look even more distressing. Luxury e-commerce players like Matches Fashion and Yoox Net-a-Porter have shuttered or been sold for a fraction of their peak valuations.