In October 2022, after completing a multimillion-dollar renovation, Australian furniture and lifestyle retailer Coco Republic opened its flagship San Francisco location at 55 Stockton St. in Union Square.
Seven months later, a Coco Republic spokesperson told SFGATE that its flagship San Francisco location is set to close in the next few months, citing a familiar reason: lack of customer foot traffic, which the company pinned in part on unsafe conditions — or at least people’s perception of unsafe conditions — in the surrounding area.
“[It] has become clear that downtown San Francisco is no longer a viable option for Coco Republic’s flagship store,” the spokesperson wrote in an email, adding, “It was a difficult decision and one that was not taken lightly. The recent closings of Whole Foods, Nordstrom, Saks Off 5th and Anthropologie show that ours is not an isolated problem in Union Square, and we hope the city will be able to address the issues that are making it so challenging to do business there.”
An interior shot of the Coco Republic store at 55 Stockton St. in San Francisco’s Union Square.
Courtesy of Coco Republic
The property at 55 Stockton St. previously housed a Crate & Barrel, which closed in March 2022 after its lease expired, a Crate & Barrel spokesperson told SFGATE at the time. Coco Republic renovated the 53,000-square-foot space and officially opened in October.
But already, the retailer is planning to pull the plug on its Union Square endeavor. Employees were notified of the impending closure Wednesday afternoon, the spokesperson confirmed. Rather than shipping its goods to other locations, Coco Republic plans to hold a sale of its Union Square inventory over the next few months and then close mid-summer, likely by end of July.
An interior shot of the Coco Republic store at 55 Stockton St. in San Francisco’s Union Square.
Courtesy of Coco RepublicThe specific reasons for store closures in Union Square and downtown San Francisco have become a tenuous subject, with lots of political jostling. In early April, after the closure of the Market Street Whole Foods, District 6 Supervisor Matt Dorsey — a close ally of the San Francisco Police Department — unveiled that he’s working on a charter amendment to maintain a minimum number of police in the city.
And in early May, when Nordstrom announced the closure of its longtime location at Westfield San Francisco Centre, a Westfield spokesperson put out a scorching statement attributing the city’s retailer attrition to “unsafe conditions.”
That statement, however, did not appear to be a full accounting of factors that might cause closures in the mall. A few days later, the San Francisco Chronicle reported on Westfield’s struggling restaurants; in one instance, Westfield had been charging a local hot dog chain in the mall’s food court $28,000 a month in rent. Despite months of the owner of the hot dog chain asking for a decrease in rent, it wasn’t until the Nordstrom closure announcement that Westfield finally floated a new rent offer to the owner of the hot dog chain: $12,500 a month, or 18% of gross sales, according to the Chronicle. (SFGATE and the Chronicle are both owned by Hearst but have different newsrooms.)
In the case of Coco Republic, a spokesperson cited a University of Toronto study showing that compared to pre-pandemic levels, San Francisco has had the worst economic recovery of any major North American city. The spokesperson confirmed to SFGATE that Coco Republic’s Union Square location hasn’t had any serious crime incidents, which the spokesperson credited to the company’s security services. The spokesperson reaffirmed that the reputation of the surrounding area — that there are unaddressed safety issues — has contributed to downtown’s stalled economic recovery and lack of customer traffic.
Two other Coco Republic locations remain in California: one in Culver City, and a “new flagship” in Orange County, which is slated to open later this month.
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