We visited Herschel Supply Co.’s new flagship in New York, which celebrates its roots—and plants some new seeds

In 1906, Lyndon Cormack’s great-grandparents emigrated from Scotland to Canada, eventually settling in rural Saskatchewan, where two generations of his family were born, including his father. Cormack, who grew up in Calgary, Alberta, remembers he and his brother, Jamie, piling into the family station wagon to visit his grandparents.

“All these hills and fields… [it was] just such a special place for us,” Lyndon Cormack told Retail Brew. “The curfews and the borders and the boundaries sort of got taken away.”

The town where his ancestors settled, which in 2021 had a population of just 30, is called Herschel. And when the brothers Cormack co-founded a backpack brand in 2009, they decided they’d call it Herschel, too.

Now, Herschel Supply Co. is opening a flagship store in the trendy SoHo shopping district in New York, and it pays homage to that Saskatchewan town.

We recently dropped by the store, where Cormack gave us a tour.

Grand plaster smash: We met Cormack at the Broadway entrance of the store, a vast 4,200-square-foot space that is the length of a city block and has a second entrance on Mercer Street, with its cobblestones and a more boutique SoHo vibe than bustling Broadway.

When Herschel began renovating the store, which is on the ground floor of a building built in 1903, “we stripped it all back to its original cube, how it would have been done when the building was first created,” Cormack said.

From the walls, layers of plaster about a foot thick were ground down, revealing the original brick. The floors were stripped down to concrete that was poured when horse carriages were far more common than cars on these Manhattan streets.

After it was pared back to its original details was “when we add all these new layers to it,” Cormack said. “It’s like old meets new.”

Interior motives: Among the new aspects of the design, by Herschel’s internal design team, are bright orange, blue, and pink display shelving, and wall panels of many hues from which the brand’s signature backpacks hang.

Some walls feature cedar shingles, the type more common for homes’ exteriors, significant because the brand is based in Vancouver, where western red cedar trees are common. Also made of red cedar are a series of nonrepresentational chainsaw sculptures throughout the store.

Photographs on the walls are primarily of the town of Herschel, huge wide-format images, including the road leading into town bisecting the vast landscape, and a wheelless old pickup truck in a field, are by the brand’s director of photography, Stephen Wilde.

In an era of brand storytelling, it should come as no surprise that all these unbranded elements are on display along with merchandise at the flagship store. And Cormack, whose eye for interior design and personality is reflected in his own home, said he hopes visitors to the store learn something about Herschel’s origins and idiosyncrasies, too.

“If someone comes into my home, they learn a lot about me—they learn about what I care about,” Cormack said. “With retail in general, as people come in, they get to experience how brands put their design aesthetic together, outside of the products they make. And…it tells a lot about the things we care about.”

And one thing the brand cares about is getting consumers to think about the brand for more than just backpacks.

Mixed bag: The brand, naturally, faced a challenge during the pandemic, when students taking classes remotely weren’t buying new backpacks to haul textbooks hither and yon.

But what helped compensate for the loss of backpack sales was that some other smaller bags, like crossbody bags and hip packs, became essentials for toting hand sanitizer and masks, and “boomed” during the pandemic, Cormack said.

Today, slightly more than half of Herschel’s revenues are for items other than backpacks, and Cormack said that while stores like Nordstrom that carry the brand tend to carry more of their backpacks, Herschel’s own retail stores (and website) put other lines in the limelight.

At the new store, for example, a travel section features hardshell wheeled luggage, which the brand introduced this year.

“We’ve been on the backs of lots of people getting onto planes,” Cormack said. “We really want to be the luggage of choice as well.”

And while some visitors may be surprised to see dressing rooms in a Herschel store, the brand has a broad selection of adult and children's clothing, not to mention hats.

“We are just starting an apparel journey, but it’ll oftentimes represent close to 20% of our sales within [our own] retail store,” Cormack said. “Those discovery moments are really important in stores.”