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Shopping Centers Today -> May 2003
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FAMILY AFFAIR
Shopping centers use kiddie clusters to cater to time-starved parents
BY MAURA K. AMMENHEUSER
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| Westfield America puts its Playtowns near clusters of stores and amenities that are geared toward kids and their parents. |
It once took me 90 minutes to buy a pair of $20 sneakers at my local mall.
I’m not neurotically indecisive. Trying on and paying for the shoes required all of 15 minutes. It’s just that I have two kids. Factor in the side trip to the potty, the baby who needed to nurse, the forgotten item in the car, the snack at the food court and the coin-operated kiddie rides, and it’s amazing I got to the shoe store at all.
Fortunately, some leasing pros understand that parents are arguably shopping centers’ most time-pressed and certainly most harried consumers. Years into the industrywide clustering trend — the practice of placing retailers serving similar demographics near each other — some centers are creating clusters just for kids (and, by extension, for their parents).
“Children/family retailer groupings are becoming more and more popular,” said Greg Kahn, CEO of Kahn Research Group, Charlotte, N.C., a national retail research firm. “They’re driven by a real consumer need. Parents with young children have less time to shop than anyone else, so their needs for efficiency are greater.”
Mario Ciampi, senior vice president at Secaucus, N.J.-based kids’ apparel chain The Children’s Place, agrees. “It’s increasingly more common,” he said, adding that roughly 10 percent of his chain’s shops are in clustered spaces.
The logic behind clustering is that busy consumers will stay longer, spend more or choose one mall over another if shopping is made easier for them. “It is almost a 180-degree turn from the old mall philosophy, which was to make people walk past as many storefronts as possible to get to destinations,” Kahn notes. That strategy completely frustrates shoppers trying to cover ground at a toddler’s pace or while toting a cranky infant.
Some developers created their first clusters for Gen Y, the oft-described free-spending teen-agers and 20-somethings, so that they and older customers could shop in blissful oblivion of one another. (The Zone at California’s Glendale Galleria is a prime example.) But today several companies see value in clusters for the mommy-and-baby set, too.
Los Angeles-based Westfield America Trust is building children’s “precincts,” as the company calls them, at many centers during a portfoliowide renovation effort, said Joseph Tagliola, CLS, Westfield’s senior executive vice president. Its precincts, launched several years ago, group Build-A-Bear Workshop, Children’s Place, Journeys Kidz, kid-friendly bookstores and more. Two years ago, Westfield added Playtowns, play areas enclosed by railings and seats so that parents could comfortably watch their kids. “We turned it into a real destination for these moms.”
Then Westfield America placed Starbucks near some Playtowns, to serve all those moms hanging around watching their kids. At Valley Fair Shoppingtown, San Jose, Calif., the company also installed a Cinnabon. “It created this frenzy,” Tagliola said with a chuckle.
General Growth Properties has created similar kiddie clusters at several malls in the past four years, said General Growth President and COO Robert A. Michaels. Two recently opened enclosed regional malls, Stonebriar Centre, Frisco, Texas, and RiverTown Crossings, Grandville, Mich., are completely clustered, with designated areas for children versus teens versus affluent shoppers, Michaels said. Once General Growth installed play areas, “the strollers were lined up to park,” Michaels said.
The Rouse Co. began grouping children’s retailers many years ago, said Robert D. Riedy, senior vice president of retail leasing, and today Rouse, like General Growth, is leasing entire new projects in clusters. That’s the case with Shops at La Cantera, San Antonio, a 1.3 million-square-foot, open-air center opening in the spring of next year. (Here Rouse has also set up a cluster for such high-end retailers as Nordstrom.)
Developers are tinkering with the concept, broadening the list of tenants who could complement a kiddie cluster. Riedy, for example, cites pet stores, which generate huge amounts of enthusiasm among kids. Some malls offer day care areas. Even at LensCrafters, kids are entertained in the playscape for an hour while parents wait for new glasses. And developers, take note: A family rest room nearby is crucial.
“We also like to be near the women’s uses as well,” said Children’s Place’s Ciampi. “Our customer isn’t a 3-year-old shopping for himself.”
All in all, there’s a lot to planning a children’s spot in the mall.
“Really, really successful children’s clusters go beyond leasing the space to the tenants,” said Riedy. “It’s the play areas” or other creative uses that create destinations.
“Food, clothing, toys, entertainment are the biggies,” said Kahn. “And as the concept expands, you will probably see more things like karate clinics, even Sylvan/Huntington Learning Centers here. It makes sense. Keep the moms and dads on-site while the child has his lessons.”
At least one other developer had the same thought, but took it beyond the traditional enclosed mall. Crosland Retail’s Stonecrest at Piper Glen, a 450,000-square-foot lifestyle center in Charlotte offers Children’s Village, four buildings comprising 18,000 square feet. Its family-friendly tenants include an orthodontist, a pet store, a dance studio, EB Games, a veterinarian, a Learning Express toy store, a hair salon, a specialty maternity/children’s apparel shop and a shoe store, said Laura Griffin, senior property manager. It also boasts a park and playground.
Children’s Village tenants post $200 to $300 per square foot in sales, Griffin said. That compares with $301 per square foot for the rest of the project. The shoe store, called Shoe-In, moved to Stonecrest from a location at The Arboretum, an older, enclosed mall with no clusters, said store owner Tim Butler, who says he’s thrilled he made the move. Annual sales at his 900-square-foot space at the Arboretum were about $275,000, he said. Since opening with 1,200 square feet at Stonecrest three years ago and then doubling that to 2,500 square feet, sales have expanded to $700,000 per year.
Children’s clusters require effort, especially in established centers, executives say. Malls must provide space for strollers near play areas, and housekeeping is a challenge. And “if you’re going to do it, don’t violate it,” Riedy said. “I wouldn’t put a kids’ store somewhere else” outside the cluster. Wait until the appropriate space opens, he said.
Nobody could provide concrete financial data proving that retailers perform better in clustered spaces than in conventionally leased centers. But developers and Ciampi say the concept is sound, while Westfield America’s Tagliola points out that clustered stores routinely exceed their own sales goals.
Said Riedy: “Over time you’ll see sales increasing more by doing this. It makes more sense. Customers’ time is constrained … Whatever is in the customer’s best interest is in our best interest.”
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