Indie stores find homes amid national retailers at the mall
A lamp made from a vintage camera is a conversation starter — and that’s the goal of Rosie’s Workshop.
The cameras — both for photograph and movies — have stories behind them. Like the type of Kodak 35mm version that a young, pre-blonde Marilyn Monroe modeled. Or the type of 8mm movie camera Steven Spielberg used early in his career.
“We want to offer things that will start a conversation,” said Blair Koss, who owns the shop with his wife Jen. “That’s one of the rich experiences of being a human being. It’s making connections.”
Rosie’s is one of the latest additions at Ross Park Mall, which has been courting locally owned and independent businesses to add a unique or more experiential flair to the North Hills shopping center’s mix of tenants.
While many regional enclosed malls have had locally owned stores to a degree in the past, bringing in these kinds of merchants is a move that’s become more important as shopping centers look for a way to stand out when there’s a lot of competition for consumers’s time — and money.
In recent years, many retailers have floundered or gone belly up due to changing consumer tastes, growing online competition or high amounts of debt. Just to name a few, stalwarts like Sears, JC Penney and Macy’s have closed stores and laid off workers. Payless ShoeSource closed all of its stores when it filed for bankruptcy in February.
And while there are still almost 1,200 malls in the U.S. — a number pretty much unchanged since 2016 — according to data cited by Bloomberg, the market is fierce. Which just makes it that much more important to choose the right retailers to fill any vacancies.
“We’re very strategic on who we lease to,” said Lisa Earl, manager for Ross Park. “We always have pursued that local retailer who can bring diversity and further that destination mix of retailers. It takes a lot of planning and thinking about what is relevant and what is working.”
Ross Park Mall, which is owned by Indianapolis-based Simon Property Group, isn’t alone in trying to change up the mix.
Bloomberg Intelligence noted that the American mall is changing
as “department-store retailers — which historically signed very long leases at extremely low rents due to their now-foregone traffic driving ability — and other struggling or over-leveraged retailers relinquish square footage, while pop-ups, e-tailers and new concepts claim more retail real estate.”
That trend cited by Bloomberg can also be seen in another project at Ross Park, where work is underway to redevelop a once twostory Sears department store into a three-story multi-use complex, featuring dining, retail and entertainment. Construction is expected to be completed in the summer of 2020.
Wigle Wiskey first joined Ross Park as a pop-up and then opened a permanent location on Black Friday 2018. It’s now expanding with its Threadbare Cider House & Meadery brand next door, which is expected to open in October.
“This is our first location outside of the city,” said Meredith Meyer Grelli, cofounder and co-owner of the Strip District’s Wigle Whiskey. The company also has locations on the North Side, Downtown and at the Pittsburgh International Airport. “A significant portion of the Pittsburgh MSA doesn’t live within the city so we wanted to bring the Wigle experience to them.”
“We want to create a different kind of space — a breath of fresh air during the shopping madness,” she said.
The Ross Park Mall location is Rosie’s only physical shop and it’s not just relying on sales of its own product. If you’re more of a do-it -yourself type, you can bring in one of grandma’s cameras or musical instruments to a workshop and learn how to wire it to create your own lamp.
“We were thinking of opening up in Lawrenceville, Downtown, the Strip District,” Mr. Koss said. “We saw some interesting buildings there, but the reality is the rent on those is high. The rent here turned out to be competitive.”