HCohen schreef op 25 maart 2022 08:22:
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Aan initiatieven ligt het niet;In a new tack, Garden State Plaza is rolling out the welcome mat to mom-and-pop retailersMEGAN BURROW | NorthJersey.com
22 hours ago
eu.northjersey.com/story/news/bergen/... When Terrell Person opened his vintage clothing and sneaker shop five years ago in a small storefront in downtown Belleville, he knew he wanted one day to expand to a shopping mall.
In 2019, the Newark native moved Zuted Vintage to Pennsylvania’s King of Prussia Mall, but his dream was to bring his store back to New Jersey and its largest shopping center, Westfield Garden State Plaza in Paramus. It was a goal that seemed out of reach until recently, when the Plaza began a program to attract small businesses to operate alongside national retail chains.
“For small businesses, it’s been really hard with COVID. You need to give people a reason to come out,” Person said. “It helps being inside a mall. When you’re in a neighborhood, you don’t get hundreds or thousands of people walking past your store every day.”
The program — a collaboration between the mall and the New Jersey Small Business Development Center at Ramapo College — affords small businesses an opportunity to lease a storefront or kiosk at the mall under conditions far more accessible than before.
So far there has been a lot of interest, said Vincent Vicari, the Small Business Development Center’s regional director. An event held last month at Garden State Plaza to provide information about the program drew about 150 people. One has signed a lease and another will be signing in the coming days.
'The beginning of something'
“A business could move into the mall with nothing more than one month's rent and one month's security. No one ever thought this kind of opportunity would be available,” Vicari said. “This is the beginning of something that I see as a real positive for the small business landscape. It doesn’t mean Main Street is closing down in favor of the mall. But these businesses can take advantage of different retail ecosystems.”
The mall, which attracts roughly 18 million shoppers a year, provides ample parking, internal security, foot traffic and a customer base that a downtown cannot offer, Vicari said.
The program grew from a desire for the mall to better reflect the broader community, said Chris Neidhardt, the director of leasing at Garden State Plaza.
“For us, as we came out of COVID, we realized there were a lot of perceptions of barriers to get into our center, particularly for local, minority-owned and women-owned businesses,” he said. “We asked ourselves,
how can we support small businesses and help them get their feet wet with the hope of transitioning them into longer-term tenants.”
Flexible leases for small shopsA small business can now lease a space for three months to a year as opposed to the 10- or 15-year lease a larger company might sign. National retailers that sign long-term contracts often spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to make the space their own. But the mall has inventory that is move-in ready for small businesses that would not be able to afford that expense.
The center at Ramapo is working with business owners to develop marketing strategies and business plans, and help them secure funding.
The program is seen as a test case. Eventually, Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield, the company that owns Garden State Plaza, wants to expand it to its 25 shopping centers nationwide, beginning with Westfield World Trade Center in New York, Neidhardt said.
Paramus is No. 1
“Garden State is our strongest performer, and Paramus is No. 1 in the country in retail sales tax dollars,” he said. “We’re going to start here and see if we can replicate it throughout the country.”