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Shopping Centers Today -> December 2005
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RETAIL EXPLORER
Ian Watt spends half the year abroad gathering and sowing ideas
By Dakota Smith
Many of the world’s airline attendants likely know the face of Ian Watt, executive director of international operations at Old Mutual Properties, in Cape Town, South Africa.
Watt, one of the busiest executives in the business, travels two weeks out of each month, overseeing properties in Africa, Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East and India.
“India, twice; London, Russia, the U.S. and Bulgaria,” said Watt, listing off the countries he has visited over the past few months. And he was soon to fly off to Saudi Arabia and Italy, he added.
There may be executives who bellyache about business trips, but Watt is not among them. As far as he is concerned, scouting out new developments and running operations in far-off locales is not only a necessary component of his job, it is an enjoyable one.
“There is always something you can learn from being in another country,” said Watt, who was promoted to his current post from managing director early this year. “You get a much broader perspective of the world.”
Additionally, overseeing projects in person allows him to share his wealth of experience. “A lot of the work is developing a local team, so why should they have to go through all the learning curves?” he said, recalling a recent visit to an Old Mutual project in Egypt that was similar in scale to an earlier one in South Africa. “Much of this business is about drawing on past experiences with similar projects.”
Fittingly, one of Watt’s first business trips, in the 1970s, took him to an ICSC conference in Las Vegas. He was a marketing manager at Old Mutual then, and he paid for his own airfare to the conference. “I was determined to know more about this industry,” he said. “I wanted to know what makes people interested in shopping and retail and learn about how and why people shop.”
Today travel also allows Watt to keep abreast of innovations in retail, commercial and residential real estate. A trip to Easton Town Center, in Columbus, Ohio, many years ago left an indelible impression, for example. “I still tell people now, ‘If you want to go see the best prototype of a town center, go to Columbus,’ ” he said.
Watt was born in Howick, a town in eastern South Africa. But it was Cape Town, which he visited on holidays with his family, that tugged at his heartstrings. “I loved the villages, the seascapes,” he said. “At a very early age I told my parents I intended to one day move to Cape Town.”
A military service stint in the Navy eventually brought him there in 1965. After completing his national service in 1969, Watt joined Old Mutual at the suggestion of a fellow grad and teammate on the water polo team.
“I started off the lowest of the low,” said Watt, recalling his early days as a junior clerk. But even early on he made ripples. He leased office space to the African National Congress, a move that raised eyebrows, according to one friend and business partner, Roy Higgs, CEO and managing principal of Baltimore-based architecture firm Design Development Group.
“It was the height of apartheid,” said Higgs. “But he wanted to change the real estate paradigm. He’s always had a way of bucking the status quo.”
Watt would also buck the status quo in another, slighter sense, by developing Cape Town’s Cavendish Square, the area’s first shopping center. He undertook the project in 1972, when department stores dominated the city and few retailers understood the concept of malls. Twenty years later, Watt would return for the refurbishment of the complex.
Another first led by Watt was the opening of Gateway Theatre of Shopping, in Durban, South Africa, in 2001. This project mixes entertainment facilities — a skateboard ramp, a rock-climbing wall, a “wave park” for surfing — with shops and restaurants and contains South Africa’s largest Cineplex movie theater.
The wave park is particularly compelling, recalls Ian Thomas, chairman of Thomas Consultants, a retail planning firm in Vancouver, British Columbia, who has worked with Watt for the past 15 years. “No one had ever thought to put a wave park in a shopping center before.”
Such moves define Watt as the quintessential out-of-the-box thinker, Thomas says. “He reads all the same news and reports that we all do,” he said. “But out of that labyrinth, he is able to see new opportunities.”
According to Higgs, Watt understands that “shopping is a true entertainment experience.” As he puts it, Watt “knows the secret is to entertain people when they shop.”
Watt deserves applause for bringing both developments to South Africa, says Paul Simpson, senior director of real estate at Woolworths’ headquarters in Cape Town. An upscale department store chain, Woolworths has branches in both Cavendish and Gateway.
“In these times of ultimate teamwork and democratic decision-making, Ian is unashamedly autocratic,” wrote Simpson in an e-mail. “But at the same time, he is visionary with enormous drive and energy.”
More recently, Watt has turned that vision to residential real estate, converting a series of office buildings into condos. The firm has two residential buildings in Cape Town, and four more buildings are being converted to residential in Johannesburg.
But Watt’s life is not all about work. Water polo has been a constant for Watt, who has coached and managed the South African national water polo. He is chairman of the Western Province Water Polo Association.
Also an avid bird-watcher, Watt never travels without his binoculars. His favorite spots for watching birds include east Africa and an unlikely U.S. locale: Baltimore. When he visits Baltimore, he stays with Higgs, whom he has known for 35 years.
“He’s got an excellent eye,” said Higgs. “He’ll see a speck on a branch yards and yards away, and say, ‘Oh, there’s the speckled something-or-other bird.”
Watt’s family members include wife Dawn, the financial manager at an art school, and son Tyrone, 21, who studies alternative health care in Cape Town. Watt’s daughter, Lyndal, 24, has followed her father into the business. She is an event and production coordinator at Lifestyle Communications, a marketing firm in Pretoria, South Africa, with shopping center and retail clients. (Old Mutual Properties is a majority shareholder in Lifestyle Communications.) Like father, like daughter.
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