Douglas Friedli finds the manager of Cardiff's St David's Centre in cheerful mood as another high-profile retailer moves in.
It's Wednesday lunchtime in Cardiff's St David's Centre. Theo Paphitis grins at the crowd waiting for him to open his Boux Avenue underwear store. "Hello everybody!" he shouts, to a polite response. "Come on, you can do better than that. Hello everybody!" he yells again, getting a cheer back. The doors open, the crowd rushes in, and he's there between the bras and camisoles, signing autographs and posing for pictures.
At the other end of the shop, with a big smile on his face, is centre director Steve Madeley. It's all in a day's work, as he has overseen 70 shop openings in the past year. But he appreciates the extra sparkle provided by the Dragons' Den judge: "A lot of retailing is quite threatrical. Theo knows how to do it. It's a great example of how to do retail well."
Elegantly dressed in suit and tie, Madeley is a retailer by background, although he's now on the landlord side. A skincare specialist and former regional manager for 400 Boots chemist shops, he still spends between five and ten days a year working behind pharmaceutical counters across South Wales.
Taking a break at a hot chocolate shop in the centre's restaurant area, he reflects on the changing relationship between store and building owner: "We have gone from a very landlord-tenant type relationship ten years ago to understanding retailing better now."
For example, the centre can take a stake in tenants' performance by linking part of their rent to turnover. That gives Madeley an incentive to get more people through the doors, for example by putting on events, and takes out some of the risk for tenants.
He also makes choices about which stores join: "We need the right customers in," he says - hence the recent arrival of hardware specialist Clas Ohlson, which attracts more men. But it's not about excluding people: "I would like to think that anyone could come in and find a shop that they like."
Madeley won't say exactly which brands he would like to lure next, but he uses online networking sites such as Facebook to build a picture of what customers might want. Perhaps a few soft furnishing stores, he hints, or home-based goods.
He also wants to add variety to the centre, which is dominated by retail chains, by attracting independent stores and even charities. "It comes back to offering lots of different things to customers. I'd sooner see all the units in use."
The fun for Madeley, who comes from the Nottinghamshire mining village of Eastwood, is in the speed of change you get in retail. A few weeks before Paphitis turned up, a rather different crowd queued for hours to buy Apple's iPad 2, and there's always something new in clothing. But it can be hard - he's not had a Christmas holiday for 25 years and phone calls at 3am are not unknown.
The centre, which was 60 per cent occupied when it opened in 2009, is 85 per cent full now. It attracted 36 million customer visits in 2010, which may help Cardiff beat Liverpool to fifth place in the UK shopping rankings this year. Some customers in Mid Wales or Herefordshire who preferred Birmingham or Bristol before now will travel to the Welsh capital for their big shopping trips.
But this is not a universal cause for celebration. Retailers and supporters of other parts of the city, notably the Victorian and Edwardian arcades, have complained that the centre's sign-on terms distort competition.
Some stores have been attracted in by rent-free periods. Madeley won't say exactly what’s on offer - it depends on the retailer - but he laughs at the suggestion that anyone could get, say, two years free on five years, or the equivalent on a longer lease: "Goodness me, no. We would never offer anything like that. If you think about it, this is a commercial property building. We've got to make some money."
The arcades, he admits, had a tough time when building work on St David's disrupted the area, but should benefit from a 30 per cent rise in people using the city centre. "It's difficult to say how many units would be empty because of the recession. When we get confidence back, stores will open again."
His message for the authorities is to keep up the promotional work which keeps punters coming into Cardiff: "We are going into a difficult time for budgets. Don't do anything that compromises those efforts."
Also in: May 2011
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