Brands New
Donna Karan is moving in. So are Stone Mountain Handbags and the Balboa Beach Co.
These boutiques are among a collection of new tenants that hope to lure customers to the Camarillo Factory Stores outlet mall, where a third phase is opening in time for the holiday shopping season.
Officials from Chelsea GCA Realty, which owns and operates the sprawling Ventura Boulevard complex, have announced that the latest phase will be open for business on Nov. 1, about six months ahead of schedule.
“This helps to solidify our position in the market as a real draw for the city and the county,” said Michele Rothstein, a vice president with the New Jersey-based real estate giant. “The greater the offerings, the more premium tenants we bring in and we’re able to draw from a greater radius.”
The latest phase of the outdoor mall will add 18 businesses and scores of new jobs to the 18-month-old shopping center.
Ten of those storefronts will open in three weeks, with the remaining shops following suit in coming months.
Just across Camarillo Center Drive from the existing mall, the new stucco-and-plaster complex includes 55,000 square feet of shopping space, bringing the entire center to about 280,000 square feet.
Eighty stores will be open when the latest phase is fully operational, including Reebok, Lenox and Timberland, which are moving into vacant storefronts in the first two phases of the project.
If and when Chelsea builds Phase 4, which is planned but has not broken ground, Camarillo Factory Stores would be among the biggest malls in Southern California, boasting more than 425,000 square feet and more than 120 stores.
Those numbers do not intimidate Peggy Wimberley, general manager of the Oxnard Factory Outlet, a 35-store outdoor mall just five miles north on the Ventura Freeway.
The Camarillo center draws free-spending shoppers, she said, while the Oxnard site attracts customers seeking quality merchandise at more reasonable prices.
“We fall more in the mid-position, where it’s value-oriented, quality merchandise,” Wimberley said. “Not everyone can spend $600 on a sweater. A lot of people prefer to spend $50.”
Camarillo Finance Director Anita Bingham said the expansion of the factory outlet will translate into more sales-tax revenue--a big plus for a city in which retail sales generate more than 40% of the general fund.
“This is one more step toward bringing the full-service factory-outlet mall to Camarillo,” Bingham said. “Once you’ve got that, you expand the number of buyers you can attract.
“It will have tremendous impact.”
The city already is bursting with retail stores. Just north of the factory center on Ventura Boulevard, the Camarillo Town Center opened this summer, featuring Target, Staples and a gaggle of smaller shops.
Sales-tax revenues mean little to Laura Johnson, an English teacher who was shopping at Camarillo Factory Stores on Thursday.
“Donna Karan? That’s great,” she said. “Now I won’t have to go to L.A. to get a designer like that. I won’t have to go to Nordstrom.”
Still, Johnson sees one downside to the new development. She remembers the property being farmed when she arrived in Camarillo nearly 30 years ago.
“It’s sad to see the farmland going away,” she said. “But I like to shop.”
