Photo: Samson Yuen

Hudson's Bay has opened a 50,000 square foot women's shoe department on the ground-floor of its flagship "Queen Street" store in Toronto. From our research, it appears to be the fourth largest shoe floor in the world. The vast space is located in the entire western-portion of the flagship's ground floor which formerly housed men's furnishings.

Today was the shoe floor's 'soft opening'. More is still to come for the shoe space, possibly including a rumoured Jimmy Choo boutique.

'The Room' shoes, priced into the thousands a pair. [Image Source]

The new salon includes a luxury department called 'The Room' shoes, which carries such luxury brands as Christian Louboutin, Brian Atwood, Balmain, Nicholas Kirkwood, Azzedine Alaïa, Charlotte Olympia, Gianvito Rossi, Martin Margiela, Sonia Rykiel, Pierre Hardy and others. This shoe department was moved downstairs from its original location within the store's luxury salon 'The Room' located on the third floor.

Photo: Samson Yuen

A considerable amount of shoe floor's square footage is dedicated to storage and back-room activity. The space was designed by Toronto-based Yabu Pushelberg, which has been designing some of Hudson's Bay's interior renovations since 2009.

[Image Source]

The world's largest shoe store is in Dubai, with about 96,000 square feet. The largest department-store based shoe floor is supposedly at Macy's in Manhattan at 63,000 square feet with 39,000 square feet of selling space and 24,000 square feet of back rooms/storage. Galeries Lafayette in Paris claims to have a 64,560 square foot shoe floor with 34,500 square feet of retail space. Selfridge's in London claims to have 35,000 square feet of retail space and we haven't located the size including storage. Regardless, Hudson's Bay's new Queen Street shoe floor is massive.

Photo: Samson Yuen

Thank you Samson Yuen for his photos posted in this article. If readers have photos of this or other Canadian retail openings, please email them to us and we'll credit you: insider@retail-insider.com

We're waiting to hear back from Hudson's Bay for more updates. We'll report as we get more details. Have an excellent weekend, and thank you for reading Retail Insider.