Grand opening for mall
FOURWAYS – A grand opening was held for the new and improved Fourways Mall on 29 August and the celebration with topped off with a fun confetti drop at the Marketplace. Speeches, toasts and social media posts were other the orders of the day.
This followed our team’s exploration of Fourways Mall during its soft opening on 22 August, as reported in 3 cheers for Fourways Mall [Week ending 30 August]. Development director of Fourways Mall told us that the mall is now servicing the immediate community better than before as previously, it wasn’t able to due to the lack of variety available.
“We only used to penetrate about 17% of our market and that was due to not having the availability of stores. There were a lot of stores for example like the Foschini Group that has about 18 brands but we only had about five of them. We were not servicing our immediate community properly and that’s why the need was there to do the expansion. This development obviously houses everybody and we believe we only need to penetrate five per cent of the immediate community within a 5km radius,” he said.
Servicing a whole lot more than just their immediate community, the mall has penetrated double of the market in surrounding areas to what they actually needed which was a mere 33%. Koupis said the mall was a premium shopping experience which catered for Level 1 LSM all the way through to Level 10+ LSM.
“The market in Fourways ranges from person to person. There’s something for everyone here and our shopper is someone who is buying across the range,” he said. For him it wasn’t about building the biggest space but creating an experience.
“We had to get that space taken up so when you go to the likes of Woolworths, Edgars Foschini etc., we had to identify how much do you need in Fourways Mall and they can gauge from existing turnover. This mall was already successful and from the success you could already gauge what the numbers will be to permit them to do a big store without the risk, so they have all taken the biggest footprint they’ve ever done in South Africa at Fourways Mall,” he said.
Besides having some of the biggest retail stores, they also have things that other malls don’t, such as the Kidzania area and the art gallery on the rooftops. “Patience was one of the biggest lessons I learnt while on this project. The stores that are here are the first of their kinds in South Africa. We just doing everything better: Better security, better everything! In the future we are looking at hotels and even conferencing facilities, so be prepared,” he said.
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