The FINANCIAL — Bata, Parfois and Nike have all opened in Tbilisi Mall recently. Alongside these world famous brands customers can also find a shop of the Georgian designer Avtandili’s clothes.
The clothes stores are not the only new openings in Tbilisi Mall. Global fast food brand Burger King was opened two months ago. A new cinema, beauty salon, GPC pharmacy branch are all planned to be opened in the near future.
Besides the high fashion brand corridor the Mall will offer an electronics corridor consisting of Vestel, Alta, Smiley, Zoomer and Philips stores.
The week of the Baby Expo Exhibition was the busiest week ever in the history of Tbilisi Mall, officials claim.
The Mall won the recognition of 200 experts in Georgia and received a Golden Brand award in the category of the ‘favourite brand of shopping centre’ and the ‘most successful debut of the year’. “We are trying to add something new to the Georgian lifestyle and people who come to Tbilisi Mall will be able to see what we are bringing to the Georgian market. The Mall has brought a new concept to shoppers – the ‘everything under one roof’ idea. The experts have seen in one year how much improvement we have contributed to the market. Having a good team is important for achieving such big success. We won two awards this year and we hope to win three awards next year for sure,” said Gary Dunkley, Tbilisi Mall Director.
“The footfall coming to the Mall is growing every week; on Monday-Friday we average around 15,000-16,000 per day, and on Saturday and Sunday around 20,000. The majority of the customers are Carrefour’s. The average amount of time that a customer spends in the Mall is about two hours. The Mall also provides around 1,500 jobs.”
Tbilisi Mall opened on 7 April 2012 and is the largest retail centre in the South Caucasus region.
With 15 stores operating at conception, the mall now boasts 65, mostly international, retail stores and has recently won a Golden Brand award for ‘favourite brand of shopping centre’ and the ‘most successful debut of the year’. The Tbilisi Mall Director has spoken to The Financial about what it takes to manage a shopping destination in an emerging market.
Q. What challenges has Tbilisi Mall faced so far?
A.The key challenge for Tbilisi Mall is to accelerate more retail growth into and within Georgia in order to optimise the space in Tbilisi Mall and satisfy the volume and expectations of the consumer. Typically in any new retail market similar to Georgia, building confidence with the retail brands is critical. At a country and city level, Georgia and Tbilisi have taken some fundamental steps resulting in positive international media coverage. As a property, Tbilisi Mall has taken various steps which include managing the asset as a retail destination through the appointment of Veritas Brown Cushman and Wakefield, one of the largest global real estate management companies, to help us further improve the mall’s performance and reach out directly to the brands through their global offices.
Q. When you say you want to make Tbilisi Mall more than just a shopping destination for people, how are you going to do that? To achieve this surely the Mall has to offer people more choices both in retail and leisure, so what are your plans in this regard?
A. The question follows on quite nicely from your first question. Creating a retail and leisure destination requires a careful review and management manoeuvring of the property´s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. Recognising our location and building physical attributes, we decided that the future sustainability of Tbilisi Mall lies in first incrementing clusters of retail categories whilst enhancing the competitive position of Tbilisi Mall. Our first step in executing our interests was and will continue to be to bring new fashion brands to the market, which I believe has been relatively successful with the opening of Zara, Aldo, Marks and Spencer. Our future steps will be to further enhance our offering to the consumer by encouraging wider selection of convenience retail which we have already started with Carrefour, Smiley and Anthorara. The final objective will be to focus on entertainment and leisure with the launch of the food court, health clubs, cinema and an exclusive visitors entertainment attraction in Tbilisi Mall.
Q. Tbilisi Mall was the first location for several brands in the country that are now opening more branches in other districts of Tbilisi. How does Tbilisi Mall help brands to sell their goods successfully?
A. Unfortunately the answer is not simple, but is the natural evolution of the retail industry. As is the case in any country there is always be competition and the focus to help retail sales from a property management perspective it is in growing and sustaining the number of spending consumers that come to our property. We are still a long way from reaching our desired expectation, yet with careful management control of the retail selection, retail churn coupled with meeting consumer expectations through events, exhibitions and evolving changes, I expect to achieve our goals.
Q. That begs the question – if brands like Zara and Massimo Dutti, which brought so many customers to Tbilisi Mall, open elsewhere in the city, then will that not take customers away who would otherwise be coming to the Mall?
A. Yes, you are right, customers will visit other locations and if we thought otherwise, we would be wrong. It is therefore very important to keep our customer, retailers and the mall owners interested in Tbilisi Mall by driving my team to continue to be the first to bring more brands to the market, continue to offer events and exhibitions and encourage the retail stores to keep offering more exiting promotions and offerings in conjunction with mall marketing activities so that we continue to keep the mall as a preferred retailer and consumer choice.
Q. Finally, would you say that Tbilisi Mall is winning over customers from shops downtown? Is the largest shopping mall in Georgia contributing to the development of the retail sector in general, or to the contrary – damaging it?
A. The opening of Tbilisi Mall has helped accelerate the increase of retail consumer choice, which in turn has naturally encouraged competition between brands for the capturing of consumer spends. In my opinion, Tbilisi Mall has therefore been the catalyst to support the evolution of retail competition, which is more about consumer choice of brand than store location at this point in time.
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I have never worked in this region before. I used to work in the United Kingdom. For 23 years I was in the military, in the army. The war in 1982 between England and Argentina was a part of my early life. After that I was given a job in a shopping centre and I loved it. My first position was as cleaning manager for a shopping centre, not Mall Director immediately.
Getting Tbilisi Mall full and profitable is a driven ambition at 54. Tbilisi is a very pretty city. I am very fortunate in terms of skiing. I am one and a half hours away from Gudauri in Tbilisi. It’s fantastic. I am very happy here. I love Hinkali very much too. People are very hospitable. I will stay here as long as the company needs me. My family and golf are the things that I miss the most in Georgia.
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