Retail Powerhouse in Brea Upgrading Its Retailing Range : Merchandising: The shopping center will add 50 more shops for a total of 190 when the job is complete next year. That will cap $120 million in improvements.
It started as a regional mall like many others. Nothing particularly different set Brea Mall apart from the other stucco shopping monoliths that dot Southern California, except it had an ice rink.
Today, the ice rink is gone, but the mall has developed into the retailing powerhouse of North Orange County. One renovation has followed another, a combined $120 million in improvements that is adding more than 200,000 square feet of specialty and department store retail space.
And the mall will add 50 more shops for a total of 190 when the job is complete next year.
“Brea is a super area. Everyone wants to be there,” said Ian Brown, a senior marketing consultant for the commercial real estate firm of Grubb & Ellis in Newport Beach. “Retail space around the mall in Brea is a highly prized commodity.”
Just how highly prized? Consider:
* Nordstrom tore down a 10-year-old store at the mall to make way for a new one twice as large. The new store was cited as one of the Seattle-based chain’s major accomplishments of 1979 at a recent Nordstrom annual meeting. “It’s doing very well,” said Jammie Baugh, Nordstrom’s general manager for its Southern California stores.
* Robinson’s will open a new store here next summer, becoming the mall’s fifth anchor, along with Nordstrom, Sears, May Co. and the Broadway. Ground was broken Friday for the Robinson’s store. A sixth department store is planned.
* The mall is attracting such upscale stores as Jacques Verts and Godiva Chocolatier, which heretofore have been ensconced only in such hoity-toity county malls as Fashion Island in Newport Beach and South Coast Plaza in Costa Mesa.
* Brea Mall shows up consistently in marketing surveys as second in the county only to South Coast Plaza in taxable retail sales. In 1988, the latest statistics available, Brea Mall had $188 million. That is a distant second to South Coast Plaza, which had $624 million in sales, tops in Southern California.
The mall’s success as the shopping mecca of North County is a triumph of both demographics and positioning.
The 13-year-old mall has tapped a clientele from such ritzy high-growth areas as Anaheim Hills. And at the same time, Brown said, the mall has drawn the upper crust from such older communities as Whittier, Yorba Linda and Fullerton.
Its demographics are some of the best in the county: young and well-to-do. The average Brea Mall patron is 41, has a household income of $60,000 a year, is married, has children and shops 80 to 90 minutes at a time, mall marketing director Diedre E. Palmer said.
The mall has tried to appeal to upscale customers with new marble floors and elaborate indoor fountains. At the same time, it has tried to keep a touch of the rural character of the nearby hills with huge, wood-beamed ceilings and expansive skylights.
Designer shops have followed--and Brea Mall has been more than happy to accommodate them. “We’re trying to upgrade our retailers wherever we can,” mall general manager James Charter said.
Besides making money for retailers and its owners, Corporate Property Investors of New York, the mall has become Brea’s biggest contributor of sales tax revenue. Overall, the mall has accounted for roughly 10% of the city’s revenues, said real estate consultant Al Gobar, who conducted a study of the mall’s contributions to city coffers.
Situated on Imperial Highway within eyeshot of the Orange Freeway, the mall was conceived as a regional shopping center in 1969. Brea Mayor Pro Tem Wayne D. Wedin, an economic development consultant and former Brea city manager, said the city built the center before other planned malls went ahead.
“Everyone was telling Brea you couldn’t do it, you’ll never make it,” he said. “And that’s not the right thing to tell Brea.”
The mall has also become a city center. Brea Olinda High School held its prom recently at the mall with such success that couples did not want to leave when the music stopped, Palmer said. Party-goers could visit a fortuneteller, have their photograph snapped, be penned by a cartoonist and nosh on free Haagen-Dazs ice cream.
The mall also holds many civic and charitable organization fund-raisers.
