Home goods store compared to Bed Bath & Beyond opens new location in Passaic
PASSAIC – A growing home goods chain has opened its first Passaic County store in the former Botany Mills complex.
The store opened Tuesday and is the 15th location for Value Zone.
The New Jersey-based home goods and small-appliances store is the newest tenant in the 1.7 million-square-foot Passaic Industrial Complex and one of the growing number of retail tenants inhabiting the former Botany Mills complex.
The owner of the chain, Majdi Salem, said Value Zone, for those who don’t know it, is “like Bed Bath & Beyond,” but “at half the price.”
The store is in the complex that once housed textile factories along the Passaic River and Route 21.
It’s made up of 23 buildings on 30 acres that house more than 200 businesses.
Value Zone occupies 20,000 square feet of the strip mall portion of the complex, joining tenants including Dollar Tree, McDonald’s and Sherwin-Williams.
Salem said he was convinced to give the strip mall off Route 21 a try at the behest of Joe Smouha, who owns the industrial complex.
It wasn’t a hard sell, Salem said, since the property is close to Route 21 and has ample off-street parking for customers. The new store will have 15 employees.
Value Zone, Salem said, is thriving despite the challenges of the retail marketplace because it provides “quality at low prices.”
Value Zone opened its first location in Orange in 1998, Salem said. Since then, he said, he has opened a new store every two years on average. There are Value Zone locations in Newark, Irvington and Bloomfield.
For Smouha, whose Mynt Properties LLC bought the Botany Mills site in 2013, Value Zone moves the strip mall closer to full occupancy. It still has 26,000 square feet of space available for lease.