Trend #3 Shops got smaller, but owners now do more with them. Retailers on city streets have persisted. And everyone got more creative about how they run their businesses.

IT’S NOT JUST malls that are re-thinking themselves. Business operators who have surfed the tumultuous waves of retail ups and downs for decades are developing a new way of doing things: hosting multiple businesses out of a single storefront.

To the naked eye, Briers Home Furnishings on Fourth Avenue looks like one more upscale home decor shop, with a lot of unique pieces and a modernist-eco vibe. But selling sofas, lamps and knickknacks is just the start of what Dave Issar is doing. There's the shop, which is also online, of course, and there are a lot of lovely things in the not-that-big space. “But the store is just our brand,” says Issar, who has run Briers for 27 years alongside wife Cherie Schuman. Issar, who has retail in his blood (his family ran Carat Jewellers in Vancouver for decades; he operated Bobby Dazzlers stores in Ontario for years) has multiple other revenue streams going on. The company consults developers on home builds. They do staging for real-estate sales. They help design restaurants and offices. They have a decorating business.

That kind of multi-purposing and maximizing of a small space is going to become more prevalent, say industry observers. “Retail won't be massive big malls anymore. It's too risky,” says Michael Penalosa, a renowned Vancouver retail consultant. Instead, there will be a variety of small, distinctive shops clustered together.

Grocery stores will continue to expand but “the trend for retailers in general is to shrink and develop synergies with mixed-use developments,” says Adrian Beruschi, senior vice-president at CBRE Limited. That appears to be the plan for the giant former Nordstrom, former Sears, former Eaton's department store at Vancouver's central downtown intersection. Official announcements haven't been made yet, but Cadillac Fairview VP Salpeter says there's no way the 220,000-square-foot space will be just one department store again. “It's certain there is not one retailer that is going to take that space.”

And guess what that all means elsewhere? Big-box stores, maybe not so much.