Thomas Ennis Group’s latest pop-up store concept in Johnson’s Place, Dublin which Dan Munford visited during the lunch break at NACS Convenience Summit Europe, Dublin, Ireland, 30 May – 1 June, 2023. The new store takes two weeks to build and opens on Thursday 8th June.
Thomas Ennis is widely acknowledged as one of Ireland’s most innovative convenience retailers.
He’s also one of the key city centre retailers here in a once again thriving Dublin and when he told us about his latest development, we had to go and see his latest venture – a pop up SPAR convenience store. Can convenience retailers help revitalise city centres as well as turning a good profit?
Speaking during the event here in Dublin today, CEO Henry Armour identified the challenge of ‘declining city centres as a more important problem for our industry than inflation’ based upon his own personal experiences as a retailer and the way many markets like for instance Argentina have successfully developed coping strategies for this.
We agree with him.
Tourism may be returning to European cities like Dublin and London but working from home (WFH) is normalized and city centre retailers are under immense pressure to evolve to four-day weekends with far fewer city workers shopping their stores on Mondays and Fridays.
Insight Research Managing Director Dan Munford caught up with Thomas Ennis and asked him about his solution to this new urban normal.
“Well, we’ve come up with an idea. There are a lot of empty shops, there’s a lot of planning difficulties for businesses trying to redevelop units or buildings. So, we approached a developer with an empty unit on a high footfall, really good area in Dublin and asked if we could put a convenience store inside to occupy the space for 2, maybe 3 years with no longer term obligation and they said ‘yes’, so we’re in the process of putting up our first pop up convenience store”.
“We know that if the planning goes through quicker, well, we’ll be gone, but as you’ll see when you go inside, everything is a plug and play, it’s wheeled in and plugged in, so when the day comes to come out, we’ll unplug it and wheel it out”.
Thomas acknowledges that empty shops are a real blight in Dublin, but as the genuine entrepreneur that he is, every problem is of course more of an opportunity.
“Yourself and myself have just walked down from SPAR Merrion Row, it’s an 8-minute walk to get here and we’ve passed three empty stores that you could easily put something into.
Again, this is temporary, it’s a win-win. A win for us, a low risk for us, SPAR Ireland (BWG Foods) are very strongly behind me, helping us with this and to be fair to them, they’ve always been innovative, willing to try new things, I’ve 18 years with them so they know that if we try something we’ll do it right; Leo Crawford, Colin Donnelly, Declan Ralph, really right in behind it; ‘let’s do this!”
“And of course, the developer is really happy that the building is being used. So, it’s a win-win for everybody. The win for the developer is that he has someone in there paying rent, a rent sufficient to keep that building the way he wants it. It works for us, it works for him, it just takes the dirty look off the building”.
We asked Thomas how long it will take to get the store ready and open it?
“Well, from what you see now, we started this last Friday, so it’s not even a week yet. Look at what the team has done in a week. It’s 2-week turnaround.”
Thomas explains that the secret to this is to manage costs and keep it simple:
“The floor is like Lego, so there’s no tiling and tiling is a big expense in all new developments, so it’s just a Lego fit floor that just clicks in and goes around and it’s still a hard-wearing floor so we’ve no problem with that. We’ve purchased no equipment at all, we’ve leased everything.
The two tills have come from previous stores, the fridges are all leased, the only new equipment are the coffee machines for obvious reasons – you don’t want anything reconditioned for that – our capital expenditure is minimal compared to what we would normally pay for one of our stores”.
How long will it need to be open to start paying for itself?
“Listen, it’ll pay very quickly I imagine from the beginning, it’s a really cool area, you’ve got William’s Street South beside you, it’s a funky, cool, very cosmopolitan part of Dublin and we hope to add a little something to that area by putting a really cool, pop-up shop in it.
What’s the overall trading context here in Dublin?
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