The crush of visitors during Thanksgiving weekend at Tsawwassen Mills caught the mall’s general manager, Mark Fenwick, off guard.
It wasn’t that he did not think the 1.2-million-square-foot mall would be a success.
He had been preparing since May 2015 for the enclosed mall’s early October opening and was confident that the mix of outlet and standard retailers would be in demand.
But he was taken aback when shoppers overwhelmed his mall’s 6,000 parking spots and the three exits out of the parking lot proved incapable of providing a smooth traffic flow.
“Each time a car left the site there were a couple of new ones that wanted to drive onto the site, so we were pushing over the capacity,” he told Business in Vancouver a few days after opening day. “As far as problems go, that’s a good problem to have.”
Almost 180 stores opened to shoppers on October 5 with only a few, such as Bikini Village, Manzano Europa Bakery and Adore Cosmetics, failing to open because they were still undergoing last-minute construction.
Openings that were always planned to be closer to the holiday season include a Starbucks and a Bath & Body Works.
Even once those stores open, however, close to 20% of the mall will remain unleased. Many 1,000-square-foot spaces are up for grabs while the largest vacant spaces range up to 20,000 square feet.
“It’s an ongoing process but we have a number of very good prospects,” Fenwick said.
While there are challenges to opening the largest enclosed shopping centre to open in Metro Vancouver in decades, Fenwick said the launch was a success thanks to the hard work of staff in the preceding weeks, when he and others chalked up 14-hour workdays.
While tiring, it brought the kind of excitement he knew to expect given the sheer scale of the new mall.
Born in Winnipeg in the mid-1960s, Fenwick moved to North Vancouver with his parents when he was seven.
After graduating from Windsor Secondary and getting a commerce degree from the University of British Columbia, he set out to make his way in the business world.
It was 1986 and the city was abuzz with Expo 86.
Fenwick accepted a job and spent about a year as an assistant to a commercial real estate appraiser at Royal LePage.
He moved to Royal Trust and worked as a commercial mortgage underwriter while learning the ropes from more senior underwriters.
“I was questioned more than once by potential clients,” he said. “They asked, ‘Are you the guy who’s underwriting my loan?’ They couldn’t believe how young I was.”
As time went on, he worked on the financial services side of the business, determining who got loans and helping to manage client portfolios.
“I wanted to get back into the real estate side of the business and I had my eye on property management,” he said. “I found a position with Cambridge Shopping Centres as the assistant retail manager at Eaton’s Centre Metrotown, which has since evolved into Metropolis at Metrotown, which is the largest shopping centre in B.C.”
After a year, he was promoted to retail manager at Cambridge’s Oakridge Centre, where he worked under general manager Doug MacDougall, who is now the general manager of Bentall Centre.
“Mark is a conscientious, hard-working and very level-headed individual,” MacDougall told BIV. “He’s a very even-keel guy who just works hard and gets the job done.”
When the new millennium dawned, Fenwick was eager for change.
He wanted to become general manager of a shopping centre and, to achieve that end, he returned to his native Winnipeg.
Most of his family had already left that Prairie city, but he was enticed to return because he was offered the opportunity to manage the 460,000-square-foot Kildonan Place – the city’s third-largest shopping centre.
Cambridge merged with Ivanhoé in 2001 to become Ivanhoé Cambridge, and Fenwick stayed at Kildonan Place for another seven years.
Just before the late-2008 global financial crisis, he made another career move by becoming general manager of Ivanhoé Cambridge’s Woodgrove Centre in Nanaimo.
At 740,000 square feet, that facility ranks as B.C.’s seventh-largest shopping centre and the largest on Vancouver Island.
“Woodgrove also had a different mix of tenants in terms of the variety and the quality of some of the retailers and what they were offering,” Fenwick said.
While tenants such as Zellers and Sears anchored Kildonan Place, Woodgrove was slightly more upscale, with Hudson’s Bay Co. as its anchor.
Tsawwassen Mills is about as big as Guildford Town Centre, which is B.C.’s fourth-largest shopping centre. Once the 550,000-square-foot Tsawwassen Commons opens early next year across the street from Tsawwassen Mills, the two malls, if considered as one shopping hub, will be slightly larger, at 1.75 million square feet, than Metropolis at Metrotown, which has 1.72 million square feet.
(Image: Mark Fenwick checks email outside a statue at his Tsawwassen Mills mall | Rob Kruyt)
The only other B.C. malls that are larger than Tsawwassen Mills are Park Royal, at 1.4 million square feet, and Pacific Centre, which has 1.35 million square feet, including Holt Renfrew.
The opportunity to manage such a large mall also came with the chance to sketch out procedures from scratch.
New initiatives include what Fenwick calls stow-and-go, which is where shoppers can drop off parcels at a spot in the mall and then continue shopping.
“Just text us and we’ll walk the parcels out and hand them to the customers or load them into their car for them,” he said.
Similarly, if customers have ordered e-commerce delivery to stores in the mall, Fenwick said his staff could pick up the parcels and deliver them to a guest services kiosk as long as the customer has notified the individual stores. Staff could then also deliver those purchases to an outdoor pickup point, Fenwick said.
“It’s a great opportunity being a startup,” he said. “There haven’t been many malls built in Vancouver in the last couple of decades, so I saw this as a chance that I didn’t want to pass up.”
Once the frenetic pace of launching a large mall and guiding it through the holidays eases, Fenwick would like to get involved in some community organizations, such as the Delta Chamber of Commerce.
He was involved with the Greater Nanaimo Chamber of Commerce and Tourism Nanaimo when he lived on the Island.
“As much as I love Vancouver Island, it’s a great opportunity to be back in the Lower Mainland,” he said. “Some of my best friends from university are here, so it’s good to be in close contact with them now.” •
