Bal Harbor Shops Leans Into Holiday Decor To Excite Consumers And Encourage Spending

Does it or doesn’t it. Holiday decor, that is. Does dazzling decor predispose consumers to open their wallets wider? Matthew Whitman Lazenby, president and CEO of Bal Harbor Shops isn’t sure.

“It’s interesting, as landlords we’ve traditionally had direct exposure really just to the tenants, so trying to understand what the tenant’s perspective was on things like this was paramount,” said Lazenby, whose center is ranked as one of the highest-grossing malls in the world with sales of $3,000 per square foot in 2015. “As we’ve evolved – I’m generation four in my family’s business, we’ll turn 60 in 2025 – we’ve realized that’s really not enough. You’ve got to be able to enter the heart and the psyche and the mind of the end consumer.

“We’ve obviously seen this year major decisions by major retailers on Fifth Avenue, for example, where major light displays and major light shows were foregone, and we hear people lament that those things are cancelled,” Lazenby continued. “I feel like retail interactive experiences do influence the modern shopper’s journey.”

So much so, that Bal Harbor Shops last year launched a roving facsimile of the center using 30 shipping containers with satellite stores from its top performers. This season, the pop-up shopping center appears in markets such as Raleigh, N.C., and West Palm Beach and Sarasota, Florida.

“In holiday 2023, we launched this pop-up concept, which is 30 shipping containers that we move from city to city in the Southeast,” Lazenby said. “We operate essentially a small shopping center from these shipping containers for eight weeks in each market.

“We’re presently in West Palm Beach,” he added. “It’s 10 retailers that are anchored by a 150-seat restaurant, but it’s meant to replicate the underlying experience of Bal Harbor shops. We’re actually operating that ourselves. We have some retailers who treat the store pop-up just like they treat any store. They have a store manager, they have employees, they just happen to pick up and move every eight weeks. But most of our participating brands partnered with us and ask us to operate their store for them, with obviously lots of input on store merchandising direction from them.

“We’re seeing interesting patterns of consumer behavior emerge from that. The thesis really was to try to try to bottle the Bal Harbor experience and take it out on the road in this sort of exhibition style retail experience,” Lazenby said.

These are markets that wouldn’t ordinarily be associated with luxury retail. Which is exactly the point. “We could demonstrate to participating brands that there were significant pockets of ultra high net worth that really had no access at all to luxury products without hopping on a plane or driving for hours in a car.

“So what we’ve seen is that the more true we strike that nail so to speak,” Lazenby continued, “there’s a lot of built-up anticipation and a lot of excitement around events that we might host, so there really is pent-up demand, whereas when we go to markets where those retailers are more broadly available for lack of demand for the experiences, that pent-up demand is not quite as evident.”

Bal Harbor Shops is creating experiences, which is what Millennials, who wield the wallet power today, are craving. “My grandfather always said, Walt Disney’s objective was to make people happy, and I think our objective is to make people feel special,” Lazenby said.

Like other centers, Bal Harbor gets sales reports from the previous month about 20 days or so into the month. “So, we won’t know what December will look like until close to the end of January,” Lazenby said. “But through November, what we’re seeing and what we’re hearing is that there’s a softening in the luxury sector that’s happening really on a global scale.

“Markets like China of course are getting all the attention in terms of the diminishment of sales, but it’s not limited to China,” the CEO said. “Lots of our luxury brands are not performing to plan and they’re not performing favorably versus last year. What we’re seeing and what we’re being told is that really at the highest price points, the most expensive jewelry pieces, for example, in markets like Bal Harbor, that have a strong traditional sort of core luxury customer, those products are actually exceeding pace from previous years. But anything that skews more aspirational, that market has dried up entirely.”

Markets like China of course are getting all the attention in terms of the diminishment of sales, but it’s not limited to China. Lots of our luxury brands are not performing to plan and they’re not performing favorably versus last year. What we’re seeing and what we’re being told is that really at the highest price points, the moist expensive jewelry pieces, for example, in markets like Bal Harbor that have a strong traditional sort of core luxury customer, those products are actually exceeding pace from previous years, but anything that skews more aspirational, that market has dried up entirely. in