Retail openings popped off in 2021, a year that bucked the trend of closures outpacing openings, a phenomenon that was supercharged by the pandemic.

• This year is keeping the pace: By the end of January, announced store closures (742) were down 65% YoY, according to Coresight Research. Openings, on the other hand, stood at 1,910—a 3% bump.

With demand for brick-and-mortar space trending up, where will retailers open up shop? Well, some in the real-estate industry believe mixed-use space is part of the answer.

“If you’re a single-use facility, you’re not going to be able to compete because you only got one type of offering,” J.F. Finn, principal at architecture firm Gensler, told Retail Brew. “Flexibility and multiple uses are why mixed-use has become such a driver for everybody—because it has the ability to create the synergy and the creative value around it.”

A whole new look: San Francisco’s 100 Stockton used to be a single-use property—a former Macy’s that is now under redevelopment for mixed-use. Gensler started renovating and retrofitting the building in 2017, and it will now include 200,000 square feet of retail space and ~50,000 square feet of office space.

• The surrounding area includes retailers like Neiman Marcus, Louis Vuitton, and Chanel, plus several luxury hotels, making it attractive for new retailers to set up shop, Finn noted.
• The redevelopment is still underway, but restaurant Chotto Matte plans to open there this year.

Ben Tranel, principal at Gensler who has worked on the new development, said the space, originally built in the 1970s, didn’t open itself up to the city in a way that was inviting before.

“It wasn’t engaging with the city around it at all. In fact, it turned its back on the city,” he said. “Why a retailer would be attracted to that space now—any mixed-use project—is that you’re going to have a more continuous presence of people in that environment. It’s not a monoculture where people are only going there for the transactional purpose to shop.”

Click here to read more.—KM

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Shipping products may be an everyday part of running an e-comm biz, but it also generates a lot of waste. Boox, a zero-waste shipping platform, is offering a solution with its latest product: the Boox Baag.

Founded in 2019, the company’s original product, the Boox Box—made from corrugated polypropylene plastic—enabled retailers to reuse shipping boxes after retrieving them from consumers. The Boox Baag, made out of recycled nylon and polyester, now offers brands a reusable shipping alternative to single-use bags, which were particularly popular among apparel companies coming to Boox who preferred them over boxes.

• Shoppers can drop off their Boox boxes and Baags across 10,000+ Boox Return Places in the US (operated via a partnership with Happy Returns) and the UK (operated via InPost lockers). Boox refurbishes and redistributes them to its partners to be reused.
• The price to ship through Boox varies by size and volume, but it ranges from $0.40–$1 per shipment, said Matt Semmelhack, CEO and co-founder of Boox.

“The main thing is the combination of the physical product, which is the box, along with this system of reverse logistics that we’ve organized to recover boxes and, soon, bags,” Semmelhack told Retail Brew. “We think of the whole thing as a network of reuse or a platform for reuse, as opposed to just a packaging company.”

Bold ambitions: Boox now has ~60 active clients across beauty and apparel, including Boyish Jeans and Ouai. It did 100,000 shipments in 2021, and wants to 10x that number to 1 million this year—betting on new partners and its expansion into the UK.

• The company also wants to hit $10 million in revenue in 2022, per Semmelhack, but didn’t share its 2021 figures.—JS

Today’s top retail reads.

Aisle see ya: And then there were (reportedly) three. As another Kmart shutters this weekend, what was once one of the biggest retailers in the US is now more prominent in memories. (AP)

Tag it: Exploring AI’s role in the future of pricing. (Business of Fashion)

Think fast: Why Fridge No More is no more, according to co-founder Pavel Danilov. (Insider)

You’re definitely going to want fries with this:

• On April 10, 1995, the city of New York started to clear the air, banning smoking in restaurants that seat 35 or more.
• At higher altitudes on that same date, but in 2019, small packages took to the air, when the first drone home-delivery service began in Canberra, Australia, by Alphabet-owned Wing.
• On April 13, 1899, Alfred Mosher Butts, inventor of Scrabble, was born in the hard-to-spell city of Poughkeepsie, New York.
• On April 14, 1902, James Cash (JC) Penney opened his first store, the Golden Rule store, in Kemmerer, Wyoming.
• And on April 15, 1955, Ray Kroc opened his first McDonald’s in Des Plaines, Illinois. But it was actually the ninth McDonald’s, with the previous eight having been opened by brothers Dick and Mac McDonald. (Kroc had been a milkshake-making Multimixer salesman, calling on the brothers when he learned they were looking for a national franchising agent, and later bought the biz in 1961.)

Catch up on the Retail Brew stories you may have missed.

• Goodbye, minimalism: How Gen Z is reshaping retail product design
• A primer on how the pandemic has changed the beauty biz
• Why Canadian cities are so popular as test markets