As the economic recovery continues to gather momentum and consumer confidence heads towards pre-recession levels, many retailers have seen their profits rise and bottom line strengthen. Until recently, this recovery has failed to positively affect clothing retailers, but the warm summer weather in June took great steps towards rectifying this situation – meaning clothing retailers are now playing catch up in terms of commercial property expansion in order to capitalise on improvements within the retail industry.
One such retailer is Primark, which has recently begun to invest in larger store leases as a means of showcasing a wider range of stock for customers. This has seen the budget clothing brand move into Canterbury’s Whitefriars shopping centre, occupying the 40,300 sq ft anchor store which was formerly home to British Home Stores.
The new store is Primark’s 163rd outlet in the UK and Ireland, and spans three floors of the town centre development. Other tenants include Boots, Marks & Spencer and Fenwick.
Director of shopping centres at commercial property firm TIAA Henderson, Chris Parfitt, believes that Primark’s new opening could prove extremely beneficial for both the brand and for Whitefriars itself.
He says; “Canterbury has long been an established and desirable destination for shoppers which, combined with its large student population, Whitefriars Canterbury presented an excellent opportunity for a Primark store.
“The opening of Primark in Whitefriars Canterbury reinforces the centre’s position as more of a ‘retail destination’ than shopping centre, with open plan, sympathetic architecture that compliments the historic and idyllic setting of the city.”
Primark’s latest opening very much fits in with the brand’s key targets for the coming years, as it seeks to take out leases on increasingly large stores as a means of widening its consumer pool and growing returns for parent group Associated British Foods. This aim has seen, in the past month, confirmation that Primark will take over a shopping centre in Birmingham with around half of the floor space within used to create one of the retailer’s largest UK stores.
In addition, the opening of the store in Canterbury fits with Primark’s desire to primarily target the lucrative student market, which has for some time proven to be one of the brand’s greatest sources of growth. The low prices and fashion-forward ethics prove very attractive to those in the 18-24 year age range, and have seen pricier high street retailers such as New Look and Topshop lose out to the discount brand.
With Primark going from strength to strength, and numerous development and redevelopment projects ongoing within the retail industry, it would be fair to predict that Whirefriars Canterbury will not be the only complex anchored by a Primark store in the near future.
