By Glen Korstrom. Image: Oakridge Centre general manager Susan Nicol stands with Vincent van Gogh’s great-grandnephew, Willem van Gogh, at a launch party for an art exhibit at the mall | Photo: William Luk
An art exhibit that gives visitors a hands-on experience with Vincent van Gogh’s work is one of the strategies that a Metro Vancouver mall owner is using to attract visitors.
This summer, shoppers will be able to go to another mall and see workers assemble a colossal reproduction of the Tower of London made out of candy.
The trend is clear. With e-commerce increasingly the engine of retail sales growth, shopping mall owners need creative thinking to draw customers while crafting a consistent public image for their brands.
Statista estimates that Canadian online sales rose 14% in 2015 – a year in which Statistics Canada reported that overall retail sales increased 2.6%.
“We’re a shopping centre, but, more than that, we’re a shopping experience,” said Susan Nicol, general manager of Ivanhoé Cambridge’s Oakridge Centre.
One way she is reinforcing the mall’s image as a high-end retail destination is by hosting a February 24 to March 27 exhibit of reproductions of Vincent van Gogh paintings.
The exhibit’s month-long run at Ivanhoé Cambridge’s Southgate Centre in Edmonton late last year helped increase the mall’s traffic by 6.5%, compared with the same period in 2014.
The works are three-dimensional reproductions of nine van Gogh paintings. Visitors can touch the brush strokes in the replicas, which are made from 3D scans of the original paintings, allowing the surfaces to be digitally recreated.
Prints are limited to 260 for each painting and cost $40,000 each. Considering the stratospheric value of the originals – one of the famous Sunflowers paintings is estimated to be worth about $48 million, said Diederick van Eck, CEO of Tribute International – this is likely the only chance many art lovers will have to literally get a feel for the way van Gogh worked – applying thick layers of oil paint, often with a palette knife.
Van Eck’s company works in tandem with intermediary Retail is Detail and Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum, which gets the proceeds of the sales to maintain exhibits.
Ivanhoé Cambridge pays the six-figure cost to transport the works and build, in its malls, temporary museums that are designed in the Netherlands and built by Dutch workers.
To recoup some of that cost, Ivanhoé Cambridge charges visitors $5 for a tour.
“It’s an investment in the brand that will bring an experience that we think will enrich our visitors’ experience,” Nicol said.
She waives entry fees for dozens of school groups that are expected to visit.
“A van Gogh exhibit at Oakridge is a good fit,” said retail analyst Michael Penalosa, managing principal at Thomas Consultants. “If you look at the demographics of the area, there are a lot of university-educated people with discerning tastes.”
He explained that while shopping centres, historically, were mainly places to shop, they now “must integrate a variety of leisure and commercial functions.”
He pointed to Oakridge’s partnership with Luxury & Supercar Weekend, which put Bentleys, Maseratis and other vehicles on display, as another example of smart marketing.
Those cars, like the van Gogh reproductions, were for sale but largely acted as a magnet for visitors. Van Eck told Business in Vancouver that he sold “about a dozen” of the van Gogh replicas in Edmonton, and he expects to sell more than that at Oakridge.
About 17,000 people viewed the exhibit in Edmonton with about half paying the $5 fee, he said.
Other mall owners have also made efforts to become known as more than simply a place to shop.
Richmond’s Aberdeen Centre, for example, hosts Metro Vancouver’s largest midnight countdown to the Lunar New Year.
Owner Thomas Fung’s goal in 1989, when he built the original Aberdeen Centre, was to create what he called the “first truly Asian shopping experience in the Lower Mainland.”
After tripling the size of the mall in 2003, Fung has tried to position the mall as being a “cosmopolitan” place and a meeting of east and west.
Shoppers, however, remain disproportionately Asian.
Fung told BIV that upcoming events are not crafted as an attempt to distinguish the mall’s brand but rather to draw traffic.
This summer, for example, his mall will welcome Pez Candy Inc. representatives who will make a colossal reproduction of the Tower of London out of candy.
“They are negotiating with the Guinness World Records to see if it could be categorized as being the highest structure built using only candy and having no other support,” Fung said.
