You Can Now Shop Fine Jewelry From Mytheresa at This East Hampton Pop-Up
Last summer, the luxury e-commerce platform Mytheresa and the L.A.-based lifestyle brand Flamingo Estate teamed up for a successful five-week pop-up in East Hampton, N.Y., in an unlikely—yet unexpectedly charming—space: an abandoned auto body shop with historic roots.
“The opportunity for the shop presented itself,” Heather Kaminetsky, Mytheresa’s president of North America, tells Robb Report. “The Mytheresa team had gone to see it. And honestly, it needed so much love and creative input.”
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Kaminetsky knew just the man for the job. She’d met Richard Christiansen, the Australian-born, L.A.-based founder and creative director of Flamingo Estate, in 2021, at a dinner Mytheresa hosted at the estate—located on a hillside in L.A.’s Highland Park neighborhood. When she saw the auto body shop, she decided to reach out, “to see if he would be interested in helping us bring it to life.”
For Mytheresa, the effort required to transform the auto shop into a luxury boutique was just another facet of the e-tailer’s surprisingly robust focus on face-to-face experiences. “We’re trying to build a community for luxury enthusiasts,” Kaminetsky says. “We do this by creating desirability digitally, but also physically, by meeting people in person. And this placement in East Hampton allows us to fulfill our goals. We learned a lot last summer. We became this destination, which was incredible.”
On June 28, the seasonal collaborators returned to the location for an encore, but they’re sticking around for 12 weeks. From now until Aug. 18, every Thursday to Sunday, summer visitors to the Hamptons will be able to shop a curated selection of Mytheresa-vetted luxury goods and Flamingo Estate-branded apothecary and pantry products at the “Railroad Racetrack,” so-named because the auto body shop is located across the street from the train station. (A central design feature is a miniature racetrack garden, stacked with race cars and Mytheresa products.)
“The space is a manifestation of Mytheresa,” Kaminetsky says. “Yes, when you go online, we have thousands of products, but when you enter this space, you see a curation of our curation, this physical manifestation, which allows us to introduce ourselves in a human way to consumers, which I find so important. We’re going to have men’s, women’s, kids, pets. (We had a lot of dogs visit us last summer.)
“There were also a lot of children that came last summer, so we are introducing a game room,” she adds.
The other big introduction for this year’s pop-up? Fine jewelry, which Mytheresa is sourcing from a mix of female-owned designer brands—including Ileana Makri, Marie Lichtenberg, Anita Ko, Sophie Bille Brahe, Lauren Rubinski and Octavia Elizabeth—all of whom have been tasked with bringing their most luxe pieces.
“Mytheresa has a very high-end client that wants something unique,” the L.A.-based designer Octavia Elizabeth Zamagias says. “They’re very willing to take risks on some of the more unique and larger one-of-a-kind pieces.”
Aiming to please, Zamagias will show a necklace she described as “emeralds by the yard,” a 48-inch yellow gold chain that hangs down to the belly button, punctuated by 30.13 carats of portrait-set seafoam green Colombian emeralds.
“All of the pieces they’ve selected are very foundational and classic pieces, but with a twist,” she adds. “Like our emerald Trio ring with an 8.86-carat emerald, a piece that we’ve made feel special and one-of-a-kind.”
The upscale strategy, Kaminetsky says, is highly intentional.
“The merchandise is definitely more elevated than last summer,” she says. “In the back room of the auto body shop, we’ve turned the space into almost a clubhouse lounge. We have all of these exclusive, one-of-a-kind collections of fine jewelry back there and they are some of the most incredible pieces I’ve seen and definitely have ever seen in an auto body shop.”
To burnish the selection, the store will host daily programming that “offers customers unique, full-bodied experiences, ranging from special product customization and energy readings with a healer, to cocktails and in-person shopping with some of your favorite designers,” according to a press release. “Porsche is also coming on board this year as an official sponsor and it will display its new all-electric SUV, the Macan, and offer test drives in its all-electric sedan, the Taycan.”
“There’s so much happening in this space,” Kaminetsky says. “Every weekend, there are designers that are doing different programs. Missoni is doing a weekend where they’re embroidering towels, and Etro has a weekend where they’re doing embroidery. Ruslan Baginskiy is doing hats.”
Even if nothing’s going on, the shop itself has proven to be a draw.
“The space is not that big, but it has so much charm,” Kaminetsky says. “We all talk about how last summer, a nephew of one of the original owners of the building came in. His name was Sparky. He brought photos from the 1940s. Then he asked me if I had a hammer. He said that they used to store bootleg alcohol underneath the floorboards, and he could find the place. And I thought, ‘Oh, my gosh, this is like a historical landmark.’”
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