Thanks for posting bclaridge. I really like that window signage. Has that very fitting art deco style.
Im not familiar with WHBM but youll have post a photo of that sign too next time you are dowtown. I will check streetviews later.
Not to mention, the art deco style matches well with the contemporary art deco design of The Westbrook building.
Here's the sign I was speaking of:
The Spotlight logo (from the windows) doesn't fit perfectly into the sign, but it could definitely work.
The sign that used to exist under the white plastic looked something like the following image, albeit rotated 90 degrees:
This is from the still-existing WHBM at North East Mall in Hurst, which opened shortly after the former Sundance location, and which uses a similar interior design to what used to exist in the 3rd/Houston space. I know because I shopped at both locations during my last semester at TCU (autumn 2017) and for some months after I graduated, but before I went back into the closet (I'm trans) in mid-2018. By the time I came back out in late-2021, the Sundance location had closed down. I was a little sad when I found out about the closure, considering the memories I had of the boutique and how the brand essentially came to represent my transition. Still, it made some business sense, even without Sundance management concerns, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic; the Fort Worth-area market already felt oversaturated, with WHBM having a nearby boutique in University Park Village, and the North East Mall boutique not that much further away. It doesn't help that WHBM sells a lot of dressier clothing, which was less-popular during the height of the pandemic (a lack of social events, along with work-from-home, made dressing up less practical).
I'll link to the Street View imagery from January 2020 so that you can see what the corner sign looked like before WHBM closed. The March 2021 Street View imagery shows what the sign looked like after WHBM closed, but before the plastic covering went up. Clearly, there would be some work that would need to be done, but it's nothing too unreasonable.
PS: I'm not sure whether the Sundance WHBM closed down in early 2021 or sometime in 2020 now, because I believe I initially misinterpreted the January 2020 imagery as being from January 2021. I'm pretty sure it was early 2021, though. I would have loved to see another clothing store (considering that the space was made for that, it would have been easy for a small and/or upstart business to adapt the space), but still, I'm just glad something is finally going to fill up a once vacant storefront in Sundance Square!
Thanks for the update. I didn't realize WHBM was there until you pointed it out. It appears that they were the original inhabitant of that retail space too so they must have had some success over the 7 or 8 years they were around.
I know that WHBM was the original retail tenant in that space. In fact, I recall when they first opened there back in 2014; this was around the same time that they opened their North East Mall boutique. The early-to-mid 2010s were a time of major expansion for the WHBM brand. I've done a lot of research into the history of WHBM; the brand has quite a fascinating history of entrepreneurship and niche marketing behind it. Before the late-2000s, WHBM only sold clothing and accessories in shades of white and black, hence the name. They actually started exclusively with clothes in shades of white, under "The White House" label (founded in 1985), and 10 years after their founding, in 1995, they opened a sister boutique called "Black Market" that carried clothes exclusively in shades of black. The two concepts merged in the late-1990s, with WHBM opening its first DFW-area boutique in the early-2000s (I'm pretty sure it was the Stonebriar Centre location, which is still operating). Although I suspect a relative of one of WHBM's founders follows me on Instagram (and the two of us have communicated on unrelated topics), this is all information that I know from the research I did into the brand's history.
(just FYI: I didn't start buying my own women's clothing until late-2014, after I transferred to TCU. I started out with fast-fashion stores like Forever 21 and H&M, so more upscale brands like WHBM weren't even on my mind in 2014, at least not in the sense of buying and wearing their stuff. WHBM didn't enter my wardrobe until September 2017, but it would soon become the brand that defined my personal style... aside from the August 2018 - December 2021 period when I went back into the closet.)
On the note of WHBM having had success in Sundance in the time they were there, I should note that the Sundance WHBM boutique was almost always devoid of other customers whenever I visited in late-2017 and 2018. Perhaps I just visited at the wrong time; that said, I only visited on weekends because of the cost of Sundance parking on the weekdays. Although I knew some ladies who worked downtown would pop in during breaks or after work, I suspect that the situation with their landlord wasn't the only reason behind their closure two and a half years ago.
That said, you could say the same thing about a relative lack of customers in their boutiques in University Park Village or North East Mall. The most crowded I've ever seen a WHBM boutique was during a visit to the University Park Village location back on October 11th of this year (last week), but they had a special in-store event going on.
Until I started shopping with WHBM, I was more familiar with brands that catered towards younger customers, so I was used to fairly-crowded stores as a sign of brand success. On the other hand, stores with a more-mature target audience don't need large volumes of customers, as long as the customers are big spenders (and more mature customers do tend to have more discretionary income). Aritzia is my other favorite fashion brand, and while their clothes are on a similar price-point to WHBM, they definitely cater towards a younger target audience. I'd suspect that the average WHBM customer is making a larger-volume purchase (ie. they are buying more clothes at once) than the average Aritzia customer. Perhaps to confirm my theory, I could do some people-watching in Southlake Town Square, where my two favorite women's fashion brands are located side-by-side.
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EDIT: speaking of now-closed DFW-area WHBM boutiques, probably the most baffling closure they did was of their NorthPark Center boutique in Dallas, which I believe happened around the same time as the closure of the Sundance location. Yes, I'm aware there was some proximity to their Preston/Royal location, but NorthPark is such a successful mall that I can't see how WHBM couldn't make it there. Perhaps people wanted to spend their money at fancier stores instead?
Still, the Preston/Royal WHBM has quite the prominent corner storefront. This is on the immediate southeast corner of the Preston and Royal intersection, and is highly visible to passerby traffic:
I suspect they might have fiercely loyal customers among the locals. Still, there would have been a time, starting almost four years ago to the day, when it might have made sense for them to close the Preston/Royal boutique in favor of consolidating their North Dallas presence at NorthPark. NorthPark actually had a newer boutique design, somewhat like the one seen here (albeit not in a corner space). This included the brand's updated logo on the storefront (most WHBM boutiques have the older, pre-2016 logo on their storefronts, which is the logo you see here); the Preston/Royal location is of an older design. I recall it took quite some time for that shopping center to recover in the aftermath of the October 20, 2019 tornado; by the time the COVID-19 pandemic struck in March 2020, there was still a lot of rebuilding they had to do.
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Enough of the off-topic stuff. Getting back to the current state of Sundance Square, it has definitely moved towards dining and entertainment, although I do think they are oversaturated in terms of art galleries... unless that is the niche they wish to be known for. I do think they should strive for more broad appeal than they are currently doing.