Cirque du Soleil vision to set up shop at Vaughan Mills
Centre’s owner will join Creactive to offer juggling, arts and crafts for family
Vaughan Mills shopping centre will be the first mall in Canada to open a family entertainment centre based on the popular Cirque du Soleil concept, it was announced Thursday.
The 24,000-square-foot facility will feature activities ranging from simple arts and crafts, such as map-making, to juggling, acrobatics, trampolines and bungee jumping for the family.
“We live in an environment where experience is key,” said Claude Sirois, president, retail, at Ivanhoé Cambridge, the global real estate development company that owns Vaughan Mills.
Malls, he pointed out, are increasingly turning to entertainment options, such as more and varied restaurants, to draw foot traffic and grow sales.
“If there is a group that knows a thing or two about entertainment, it’s Cirque du Soleil,” Sirois says.
Malls in Canada have been under increasing pressure to find new ways to draw shoppers at a time when online shopping is eroding bricks-and-mortar retail.
Arecent Colliers report concluded that in light of the Sears bankruptcy in Canada, following on the heels of retailers such as Future Shop and Target vacating big spaces, landlords must consider new kinds of tenants.
“I think the news of the IvanhoéCirque partnership is a sign of the times for regional malls, which are experiencing unprecedented challenges with their anchor tenancies,” said James Smerdon, vice-president and director of retail consulting, Colliers International.
“I think the best case for any mall is to fill vacated retail space with a productive retail tenant.
In the absence of those retail anchors, the next-best scenario is a use that generates shopper traffic and attention.”
The Colliers Spring 2018 National Retail Report described the Target shutdown as arguably the most damaging failure of an anchor tenant in recent memory and warned that the Sears closures could have a similar impact.
Both retailers overwhelmingly occupied locations in shopping centres.
The report noted that despite growth in retail sales nationally throughout 2017, 2018 has started off at a slower pace.
The retail rental market in Canada is stronger than in the U.S., primarily because the U.S. market was overbuilt in the 1990s and 2000s in a way that the Canadian marketplace was not, Smerdon points out.
Still, both countries are seeing soft leasing markets for regional mall anchor tenancies.
“The best indicator of shopping traffic that we have across the country is mall sales. So far they are holding up,” Smerdon said. “We may be in a period where sales are being propped up by population growth and inflation.”
Ivanhoé Cambridge had nine Sears stores, covering just shy of one million square feet of space.
“We are in the middle of all kinds of negotiations, either for single tenants or multiple tenants, or in certain cases, we are exploring tearing down the building and intensifying sites,” Sirois said, pointing to residential, office and hotel space as possible intensification projects.
Ivanhoé Cambridge did not have a Sears store at Vaughan Mills. There was one at their Oshawa Centre.
Sears represented less than 1per cent of Ivanhoe Cambridge’s revenue. Sears had declined as a retail force in its later years and was no longer drawing the traffic it once did, Sirois said.
He added that mall sales and traffic are still rising and the top 30 retailers they deal with remain healthy.
“There is a negative narrative, but the metrics and fundamentals remain very very strong,” Sirois said.
Sirois said the irony is that malls are bringing back entertainment components that were popular at malls 15 years ago — things such as cinemas and supermarkets.
He is expecting the Cirque family entertainment centre will draw hundreds of thousands of visitors a year.
Marie-Josée Lamy, Cirque du Soleil producer of the Creactive family entertainment centre, said the idea is to give people a peek behind the curtain at Cirque du Soleil and also give them a taste of what it’s like to participate in a show.
She pointed to examples of Creactive entertainment centres at three Club Med locations, but cautioned that the Vaughan Mills centre will be different because it won’t be outdoors, so they won’t have the same available height. She explained that some of the Club Med activities, including trapeze work, require too much assistance to be workable in the shopping mall concept.
The Cirque Creactive centre will occupy both existing space in the centre and an additional build-out to accommodate the height requirements.
Lamy said Cirque has received many inquiries from mall operators since announcing they were to set up a centre in a mall.
The list of activities to be available at the Cirque centre is still being determined, but the idea is to offer something for everyone from toddlers to seniors, Lamy said.
Opening is scheduled for the fall of 2019.
The company is in talks with Ivanhoé Cambridge over additional locations in Canada, as well as with other partners, for international markets.
Ivanhoé Cambridge is a real estate subsidiary of the Caisse de dépot et placement du Québec, one of Canada’s leading institutional fund managers.