NEW YORK — This city is not easy on shoes.
The miles of unyielding sidewalks laced with subway grates, the lingering bumps of old cobblestone streets, the seeping asphalt in the summer -- all of it conspires to topple slim heels and shred soft Italian leather.
And yet New Yorkers are still drawn to the most impractical of footwear. (Carrie Bradshaw's Manolo Blahnik obsession on "Sex and the City" resonated with women all over Manhattan.)
So perhaps it's not surprising that Saks Fifth Avenue's flagship store is opening an 8,500-square-foot designer shoe salon this summer that will feature 150% more shoes than the current showroom, a VIP room for private shopping, an in-house cobbler and a chocolate cafe.
More unexpected, however, is that the shoe department will have its own ZIP Code.
10022-SHOE -- both the salon's name and its ZIP Code -- will take up most of the eighth floor of the Fifth Avenue store when it opens in August.
Saks executives came up with the idea when they were brainstorming how to market the expanded shoe department.
"Everybody kept saying, 'You've got to come up with something that indicates it's big,' and there were a lot of mundane ideas," said Terron Schaefer, Saks' senior vice president, creative and marketing. "I thought, 'Why not try to get a ZIP Code from the U.S. post office?' Everyone said, 'You'll never get it.' "
But after a month of discussions, the U.S. Postal Service agreed to customize the last four digits of the store's 10022 code with the word "SHOE" just for the salon -- the first time a single floor has received its own designated ZIP Code.
USPS spokeswoman Pat McGovern said the specialized ZIP Code, which did not cost Saks any money, is a pilot project that the Postal Service may offer other businesses in the future.
"This is something where mail can be used as a marketing tool," McGovern said. "A ZIP Code is something that every person in America is familiar with. When '[Beverly Hills] 90210' was on the air, everyone knew exactly what that was."
There's one catch, however: the Postal Service's automatic sorting equipment reads only numbers, not letters, which means that the full ZIP Code won't do much to help direct mail to the shoe salon.
"It's really more part of the return address," said McGovern, adding that upgraded equipment may be able to handle alphabetic ZIP Codes in the future.
