Page 41 - BusinessWest December 8, 2021

Faces, at Hampshire Mall, is one of many locally owned shops that pepper both that complex and Holyoke Mall.
ing been around shopping centers throughout her entire career, she’s seen plenty of evolution in the industry.
“It feels to me very cyclical,” she told Busi- nessWest, citing, as an example, the 10 years she spent away from Pyramid Management Group, which owns the Holyoke and Hampshire malls, as well as 12 other properties. Between 2006 and 2016, she was with General Growth Properties,
taking on various marketing roles, eventually becoming marketing director for the East region.
“I was really focused on the East Coast and got to work with a lot of properties there, from marketplaces to smaller centers to super-regional centers in a variety of different markets. It was funny because, coming back to Hampshire Mall, where my management experience had started, I saw this evolution happening at the properties.”
“When I left them, I had just helped open Tar- get and Trader Joe’s and Dick’s Sporting Goods and Best Buy,” she said by way of explanation — all of them big-name staples at shopping centers across the U.S. at the time.
“Ten years later, Best Buy had closed, and we had already replaced them with PetSmart. We were putting in a bowling alley; we were putting in a gym. So I saw the the transition from the early 2000s — from Kmart to Target to a variety of new big boxes coming in — and then, when I came back, I saw that cycle over to the lifestyle components like a Planet Fitness, like a bowling
“It was really a cool evolution. That seems to happen every
so often, every few years, something fresh and inviting, when customers are looking for something new.”
alley and an arcade. It was really a cool evolution. That seems to happen every so often, every few years, something fresh and inviting, when cus- tomers are looking for something new.”
Indeed, that’s the driving evolution in malls today, she went on — a move not necessarily away from retail, but complementing retail with more entertainment, experiences, and dining options.
“There’s been a lot of change even these last few years, and then, of course, COVID hap- pened,” Gray said. “So then you see a little more of that cyclical stuff happening with the big boxes turning over and repurposing them for a variety of uses.”
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