Rails, a California Lifestyle Brand, Is Embracing Retail Expansion With Four New Stores This Year

LOS ANGELES — Fifteen years ago, Jeff Abrams launched his Southern California lifestyle label called Rails with a $5,000 investment and a six-week cross-country journey that took him to dozens of stores in search of his first sale.

Traveling from California to Arizona, Texas, across the South and up the East Coast, he would walk inside a store, peruse the racks and then ask to speak to someone about carrying his brand. The odyssey netted him a few customers but nothing earth-shattering.  

“At first, it was a very slow process to get sales. It was like pushing a boulder up a hill and just trying to figure out how to get people to pay attention to what I was doing,” Abrams said, sitting inside his 80,000-square-foot headquarters located in the industrial L.A. suburb of Vernon, California, where other big apparel companies fill warehouse-size properties.

But then he got a break. He placed two items — a hat and a garment-dyed hoodie — on consignment at the famously trendy Fred Segal store in Santa Monica. Soon he got a call that actor Matthew McConaughey walked in and bought 10 Rails hoodies for himself and friends. A few weeks later, McConaughey was photographed in an airport wearing the garment-dyed Rails piece, and sales took off.

At the beginning Abrams knew he had to be different than other brands. So the budding fashion executive with no background in apparel or fashion decided his calling card would be a soft, luxurious fabric that draped nicely. But he stuck with the casual tone of the brand.

One of his first fabrics was a rayon/Tencel blend with a cashmere feel that was central to his core item, a plaid shirt people would want to wear all the time. It was a turning point for the label.

That plaid shirt got an unexpected publicity bump when Gisele Bündchen wore it while attending the 2016 Super Bowl game won by the New England Patriots and the team’s then-quarterback and her then-husband Tom Brady. There were pictures of her on the football field after the victory with one of her sons on her back while wearing the Rails “Hunter” plaid shirt.

“We had 50,000 people come to our website looking for that shirt, which we didn’t have because it was an old shirt,” Abrams remembered. “So, we tried to sell shirts that looked like that shirt.”

Many years later, Rails is still making the plaid “Hunter” shirt, but the collection has branched out to an array of items including sweaters, dresses, skirts, blazers, outerwear, denim and menswear.

Rails now has 150 employees, is in 1,200 retail locations in 30 countries and has its own website. Not confined to the internet, the company sends out 1 million catalogs each season to catch the eye of new and old customers.

Three years ago, Rails decided to launch its own retail chain with a store in New York’s SoHo district. Now there are eight Rails locations in the United States and Europe and plans this year to add four new locations in Boston; Houston and Austin, Texas; and Washington, D.C.’s Georgetown.

“For the first 12 to 13 years, we really cultivated building this wholesale network, locally and internationally,” Abrams said. “Then as the collection expanded, we have started to build in more direct-to-consumer.”

The retail expansion has been helped by two investors — SK USA and Peterson Partners — who came on board more than three years ago and own 30 percent of the company.  

“It has been amazing to give people the full brand experience and display the brand the way we want to,” the Rails CEO added.  

The first Rails store in New York, at the corner of Broome and Greene streets, acts as a flagship and a showroom for buyers to see future collections. It has an inviting feel with large windows encased in black frames, a sleek sunny California-like interior, hardwood floors and trendy furniture.

Other Rails stores have a more neighborhood vibe, such as the outpost in Hayes Valley in San Francisco, while some are located in outdoor malls, such as Fashion Island in Newport Beach, California. There are international locations in London, Paris and Amsterdam.

“We’ve been trying to test different concepts, but all the stores seem to be working,” said the Rails founder, who grew up in Los Angeles and graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, before embarking on a jaunt through Europe using a Eurorail pass, from which the Rails name is derived.

Currently 30 percent of Rails’ revenues, estimated at more than $100 million a year, comes from d-to-c sales with e-commerce and the company’s retail stores. Abrams’ goal is to increase that to 50 percent within three years.

The collection mixing California and European elements includes menswear, introduced a few years ago, and denim, launched last year.

All these categories are sold in high-end department stores around the world including Saks Fifth Avenue, Neiman Marcus, Bloomingdale’s, Nordstrom, Galeries Lafayette in Paris, Selfridges in London, De Bijenkorf in Amsterdam and KaDeWe in Berlin with retail price points ranging from $150 to $450.

Eighty percent of the company’s manufacturing is done in China, Vietnam, Turkey and Portugal. The rest is in the United States.

The design team for womenswear, headed by Linney Warren, gets its creative inspiration from happenings in the art world, popular films and current trends. “We’re seeing what our friends are wearing and what we’re seeing out on the streets,” she said, standing in a large second-story design space with mood boards, drawings and plenty of natural light. “We shop a lot of vintage.”

The mood boards help develop the different fabrics that Rails creates with the help of primarily Chinese factories. “They create little swatches of fabric for us by hand,” the designer said. “Then we hang them all up, look at them without color palettes and choose our favorites. That’s how the collection gets built.”