Hoping to fill a gap in its lineup of apparel as well as its financial performance, Gap today is opening the flagship location of its first new chain in more than a decade.

Forth & Towne, Gap's newest store brand first announced last September, aims at the key group of women 35 and up who seem to be turned off by traditional department stores. The first store, 30 miles from Manhattan in the Palisades Center in West Nyack, N.Y., will feature 8,000 square feet of apparel. The success of the Forth & Towne concept is critical for Gap, which has been struggling to regain growth.

Last fiscal year, the company grew just 3 percent, which is well below the company's roughly 18 percent average annual growth in the early 1990s.

The New York Forth & Towne store will be followed by four more this year in the Chicago area, five more in 2006 and 20 more in 2007. Gap is keen on the demographic because it says women in this age group are expected to be the biggest clothing buyers by 2010, have the highest average income of any group of women of any age and buy 39 percent of all women's apparel.

It's also a segment the traditional Gap brand store isn't angling for. Gap stores have only 3 percent market share of shoppers 35 and up.

That's less than half its share of consumers under 35, says Stacy MacLean, Gap spokeswoman.

To lure this new demographic for Gap, Forth & Towne will depart from the traditional khaki-pants-filled Gap store and be separated into areas aimed at four types of female shoppers, says Christine Chen, analyst at Pacific Growth Equities.

Fueling fears about the company's future, Gap also warned that mid-August sales are coming in below expectations. That forced the company to cut its estimate for earnings this year by 14 cents a share to a range of $1.30 to $1.34.

Traditional Gap consumers are "bored," said Kurt Barnard, president of Barnard's Retail Consulting Group. "What the Gap is doing is not only what it must be doing, but what it should have done a long time ago."

Shares of Gap fell 13 cents yesterday to $19.44. They're down 8 percent this year, much worse than the 1.8 percent fall of shares in the broad Standard & Poor's 500 index.