The designer talks real estate opportunities and her company's newest stores set to open in the back half of the year.

Trina Turk is debuting two stores this year, opening the brand up to new markets for retail in Charlotte and Scottsdale.

A 2,568-square-foot store at the SouthPark Mall in Charlotte bows first in August, which is to be followed up in November with a 3,800-square-foot store in Scottsdale at Fashion Square.

Both stores are one-year pop-ups and reflect locations the company’s been eyeing for some time now, Turk said. The locations will serve as tests for their respective markets before determining whether each would make sense in the long run, the designer added.

The business, along with many others, is benefiting from a realization in the market among landlords of the major shifts taking place at retail today.

“Because of what’s going on in the market, from our perspective, it seems like finally the landlords are open to the concept of pop-ups, whereas a couple years ago they would not have been,” Turk said. “It seems like it was inevitable with what was going on with the bigger retail chains that were closing a lot of retail stores. So we see it as an opportunity to test locations that we already had an interest in. Scottsdale, in particular, is a town that we have had on our list for a very long time because we do quite well in Palm Springs and Palm Desert, so it seems natural that Scottsdale would perform in a similar way.”

Turk said the brand was also in high demand when Fashion Square surveyed shoppers for what retailers they wanted to see go into the center.

“[Scottsdale has] been a market that we’ve been thinking about for at least five years, but with what’s been going on with retail, we were not in a position earlier to open a store,” Turk went on to say.

Charlotte is a slightly different story. The southeast is a strong area for the Trina Turkbusiness, with sales online propelling the brand’s interest in opening a store there. The brand dabbled with a Charlotte pop-up in the past, linking with the Mint Museum, which Turk said served as another good indication of how successful a physical presence could be there.

Both stores will be include merchandise from the Trina Turk and Mr. Turk lines.

The store news comes as Trina Turk is set to launch its collaboration with the Macy’sINC International Concepts line next week. It also recently teamed with Los Angeles-based paper goods company Blue Sky for a collection of calendars, journals and notebooks — a new category for the brand — bearing Trina Turk prints and sold at Target.