How to Create Purposeful Placemaking

The death of the shopping mall is certainly not happening – especially in South Florida – according to two of that market’s most influential developers who spoke at the Blueprint conference this week in Las Vegas.

Craig Robins, CEO & President, Dacra; and Jackie Soffer, CEO & Chairman, Turnberry, shared top retail trends, including placemaking retail centers as “customer experiences,” with moderator Tigre Wenrich, CEO, LAB Ventures.

“In South Florida – and I think in many parts of the country – people want to get out,” Soffer said. “People seek people. That is our nature. People are realizing you can’t do everything from inside your home. Retailing can be more than just a transaction, it’s an experience.”

Her Aventura Mall property has blended culture, art, and fashion.

“People want to be there,” she said. “You see many of them posting Instagrams about their experiences.”

Robins said if developers and landlords imitate a look, they can get a small piece of a market with tight margins. But if they make the effort to create something new and exciting and it is successful, it pays much greater dividends.

At Design Miami, there is sculpture, and art installations, and that beauty turned it into a cultural place that added fashion, he said, while retailers used the experience to their advantage.

Soffer said the work-live-play model works because people just “don’t want to have to drive far to do things.”

Food & beverage has thrived post-pandemic as more consumers are looking for different types of food and restaurants, many of which are in retail areas, she said.

Soffer said Miami is nearly a converted New York City. Although it might not have turned into Silicon Beach for the tech crowd, as was forecast many years ago, the migration to her state since the pandemic has created a new environment.

So many from New York moved to South Florida and now they’ve brought their restaurants with them, so to speak, she said. A great deal of New York’s culture is in South Florida now – “I don’t think New Yorkers will ever move back,” Soffer said.

“There was a time when people asked me to recommend seven great restaurants in Miami so they could experience one per night all week and that was a struggle. It isn’t anymore.”

Retail ‘More Important Than Ever’

Robins said the death of retail is a misnomer because what has caused this opinion is that there had been an oversupply of retail space and not enough digital sales channels.

“It’s not been a death, it’s been a transformation,” Robins said. “In fact, retail is even more critical now, but in a different way.

“If you are a digital brand, acquiring new customers is very expensive,” he said. “You are basically a prisoner to Google search terms. You can protect yourself by opening stores. At Warby Parker, for example, they started as a digital brand and now their stores are driving digital sales.”

Retail stores can create brand loyalty through brick-and-mortar.

“They’ve got their look-and-feel, their scent, their staff, and their video displays,” Soffer said.

“It’s like before when Abercrombie & Fitch was the place to be for young shoppers who felt like they were walking into a nightclub, and you had the shirtless guy at the front of the store. There’s only so much a retailer can brand you can build on a smartphone screen.”

Digital Sales Artificially Inflated

Soffer said the old way to determine occupancy costs is being reconsidered given the in-store and digital sales calculation.She said at Nordstrom, for example, a shopper could spend $8,000 online for four suits and return three of them ($6,000) to the store. So, the store can even see negative sales as the return costs offset in-store purchases.

“This is artificial inflation of digital sales and artificial deflation of store sales,” she said. “It’s a struggle to calculate.”

Additionally, she said if a shopper buys something in-store on a sales representative’s iPad, that counts as in-store sales. But if that same shopper sees something in a store, but their size is not available, and they pull out their smartphone and order it that way, it’s a digital sale.”