Move over, Build-A-Bear: Newer digital native brands want to take over the mall

Claire’s, Aéropostale, Spencer’s, and Build-A-Bear—these are all brands and companies heavily associated with malls in the United States.

Now there’s a new crop of stores looking to make a mark on the celebrated American experience that is the shopping mall.

Rowan is a piercing studio and jewelry store that was born out of the pandemic. The company administered piercings outdoors and even sent nurses to people’s homes, before opening its first brick-and-mortar location on Manhattan’s Upper East Side in August 2020.

Since then, Rowan has opened a smattering of stand-alone studios across the country. But its newest location at the Mall of America in Minneapolis is the brand’s latest opportunity to immerse itself in an advantageous ecosystem of up-and-coming brands. Rowan is one of a handful of digitally native, venture-backed brands that are opening in Mall of America and potentially replacing classic mall brands.

“One reason we felt so comfortable with it was…a lot of the other brands that are there and the wantingness from the customer in the area for this type of experience,” Rowan founder Louisa Schneider told Retail Brew.

Mall of America has bolstered its roster of tenants since the start of the year, and more are on the way. Some names include Offline by Aerie, mattress maker Purple, and Reese Witherspoon's Draper James.

Draper James CEO Erin Moennich previously told Retail Brew that high foot traffic was a major consideration for setting up shop in the Mall of America, and Schneider echoed that sentiment. She mentioned that the mall already has three Claire’s locations, all of which perform well due to a consistent flow of customers.

But Schneider said Rowan doesn’t want to open at just any mall. A shopping center that creates entertaining experiences is key.

“I get excited about the opportunity in the right mall because I still think they are tremendous drivers of moments where you're experiencing retail. You're experiencing things for the first time,” Schneider said. “There's an entertainment factor to it, a community factor to it, and it's a way to kind of bring the online to real life.”

Tackle shop Karl’s Fishing & Outdoors is casting a line in the brick and mortar space with a store in Mall of America that held its soft opening on Saturday. The digitally-native brand’s first foray into physical retail was this year with a stand-alone location in Fort Worth, Texas.

Teeg Stouffer, director of retail experience at Catch Co.—Karl's parent company—said its Mall of America store is very much an experiment. He said unlike a stand-alone store, a regional mall location gives the company more of a chance to reel in new customers who otherwise wouldn’t have stumbled upon a tackle shop.

• “You don't get the sense that you're in this vortex of retail apocalypse there, you get the sense that you're in a thriving place of interesting brands doing interesting things,” Stouffer told Retail Brew.

The big picture: Mall of America is one of the country’s premier malls that’s keeping its image fresh with new tenants offering something different to shoppers, Stouffer said. Like Schneider, Stouffer believes picking the right mall to set up shop is critically important.

“We've come to the conclusion that malls like so many other things in our lives and in the world right now are either all the way on or all the way off,” he said. “You either have dead malls or hot malls, and we're in a hot mall.”