Frances Valentine’s latest collab shows how hotels are increasingly becoming luxury’s new storefront

Are hotels the new department stores? Well, maybe not just yet, but they’re definitely filling a gap that luxury retail left behind.

As traditional department stores struggle with foot traffic and bankruptcies, hotels—already built around experience—are emerging as a more natural home for discovery-driven retail.

Just ask Elyce Arons, CEO and co-founder of luxury fashion label Frances Valentine, which has launched a capsule collection in collaboration with The Colony Hotel, a historic establishment in Miami.

In its first-ever collaboration with a hotel, the brand has introduced a range of caftans, tote bags, accessories, and T-shirts featuring embroidery and motifs reminiscent of both brands.

For Arons, a longtime customer of the hotel, the partnership happened “organically” over the past year.

“The Colony is a great place for us; Palm Beach is a great place for us,” Arons told Retail Brew. “Because we started with caftans, and we use a lot of bright colors and big, beautiful prints, [people] associate us with resort and with vacation.”

Arons believes the collaboration is a fun way to connect both with the brand’s existing customers and also guests at the hotel.

“Anybody who’s staying at The Colony is potentially a Francis Valentine customer, because she’s chosen that location, she’s chosen that hotel, and particularly with these pieces, it all really resonates,” she said.

Through with the gift shop: We’re past the days where hotels treated their retail shops as an afterthought. Instead, they’re turning boutiques into brand extensions designed to capture guests at their most relaxed, aspirational, and willing to spend.

Even The Mark in New York City—known for its celebrity clientele—recognizes this, and has over the years amped up partnerships with luxury retailers such as Frédéric Malle and Lingua Franca along with regular pop-ups to boost its business.

“As a brand, we try to develop these products, not only to merely sell them or to develop the business. The idea really for us is to access the home of a consumer. There are not many hotels who have this power,” Etienne Haro, general manager at The Mark, previously told Retail Brew. “And this power is one of the most incredible opportunities of a hotel.”

The same goes for hotel groups like The Standard with its own merch shop or The Colony Hotel’s other retail partnerships with brands like Goop and Dolce & Gabbana.

Chalk it up to experience: This growing overlap between hotels and retailers underscores a broader shift: Luxury is moving deeper into the experience economy, where the product alone is no longer enough.

“Consumers don’t really think as much by category,” Katie Thomas, lead at Kearney Consumer Institute and co-author of Kearney’s global luxury industry outlook report, previously told Retail Brew “They’re thinking just about the overall, holistic experience. Brands are increasingly doing a better job of partnerships and figuring out where there’s overlap and not staying too siloed into what has traditionally defined luxury.”

Arons noted that while hotels can’t necessarily replace something like a traditional department store for luxury retail, they complement each other.

“There’s room for both,” she said. “Department stores really fill a need for people on a day-to-day basis, just all the time, because when you go there, you can go pick up your lipstick, buy a pair of shoes, get jewelry, get apparel.”

She added that retail shops at hotels are not only a good way to pass time but also simply a great place to discover new brands.

“I’m always wanting to go in and take over the shop and buy for them, because a lot of shops just miss the boat so many times because they’re not realizing the people they’ve got staying in this hotel,” she said. “All these women have expendable income, and they’ll go buy a gift for somebody, or they’ll go buy something to throw on that night to go to dinner. I think there’s a real opportunity there for so many of them.”