It’s the question of the hour,” agrees Denise Murray, director of marketing and business development at Briarwood. The hour she’s talking about is any one of those nail-biters in the early part of the year when mall employees find out if they still have a job. The question: how Briarwood is steering a course through the wreckage of store closures at shopping centers nationwide. Macy’s announced in January it would be closing sixty-eight stores; Sears/Kmart is closing 150; and The Limited is killing off its last 250. How much of this is pertinent to Ann Arbor’s “superregional” mall?
Four Michigan Macy’s were axed, but ours is staying. Murray says she “wouldn’t have expected it to be on the list,” particularly after Briarwood’s owner, Indiana-based Simon Property Group, “did a lot of work here last fall.” Also, she points out, Macy’s actually owns its Briarwood property—though, she adds, ownership didn’t stop Macy’s from pulling up stakes at Northland Center in Southfield in 2015. Murray worked in management at Northland for two years just prior to coming to Briarwood in 2007.
What about Sears? Murray says, with a noticeable hedge, “there are no plans for it to go anywhere at this point.” Glass half full department—it’s very easy to find a parking place on that end of the mall.
The Limited departed last year. It wouldn’t be worth a mention except for its prominent place in retail history: it’s the chain that arguably made malls what they were during the last three decades of the twentieth century.
Les Wexner grew up in his parents’ clothing store in downtown Columbus. He started The Limited—so named because it focused narrowly on younger women’s fashions—in a suburban shopping center in 1963. Enclosed malls were just starting to sprout across the country, and Wexner quickly realized that developers would need stores like his—a lot of them—to act as jigsaw-puzzle edge pieces connecting the corner anchors.
His stores were scalable—boutique-size, they could fit into preexisting spaces, could quickly bloom when successful, or could be yanked when they were not. After taking the company public in 1969, he invented, collected, or nurtured a whole stable of mall brands: Abercrombie & Fitch, Lane Bryant, and Express are just some that passed through his L Brands empire. Most have since been sold—The Limited went to Sun Capital in 2007—but L Brands still owns a small portfolio, including Bath & Body Works and Victoria’s Secret.
Today, that four-anchors-plus-a-bunch-of-L-Brands model doesn’t work anymore, and it’s Murray’s job to figure out what does. (Murray herself is a testament that Briarwood has some stability—she’s been in her position ten years, since just before Simon bought Briarwood from the Mills Corporation in 2007.) “A lot of retailers have learned to adapt to the online environment,” she says, with in-store and website sales working in tandem. “People are continuing to use Briarwood as a tool—to do returns, customer service. Also, we did a huge renovation with the restaurants,” P.F. Chang’s and Bravo!
Maintaining the infrastructure is important, she says: Briarwood’s aging terrazzo floors were recently replaced by Italian tile, another large investment. Though Murray doesn’t mention it, Briarwood has moved a couple of players into almost-anchor positions: the large MC Sports with its own entrance and the newly expanded Forever 21. Another upscale restaurant, Sozo Japanese Grill, is about to open in the Penney’s wing. And of course, for Ann Arborites who inhabit the iEcosystem, the real anchor of Briarwood is Apple.
In fact, Briarwood’s only casualty as the dust settled on this past holiday shopping season was Yankee Candle, which snuffed itself out in early January. Not good news for Yankee Candle employees, but shoppers can find scented candles close by in White Barn Candle Co. (an L Brand, natch).
