Hudson’s Bay Company-owned Saks Fifth Avenue has announced that it will open a 30,000 square foot Saks OFF 5TH store at Montreal’s CF Galeries d’Anjou in the summer of 2017. It is the third OFF 5TH location to be announced for the Montreal region, and it will be the first of the three to open its doors to the public.
CF Galeries d’Anjou is managed by Cadillac Fairview, and jointly owned by Cadillac Fairview and Ivanhoé Cambridge. It is considered to be one of the region’s top malls, with over a million square feet of retail space and anchors including Hudson’s Bay, Sears, The Brick, Sports Experts/Atmosphere, as well as La Maison Simons’ second-largest store in existence.
Last year, Saks also announced two Saks OFF 5TH stores, both opening at future dates. In the fall of 2018, Saks OFF 5TH will open a 44,840 square foot store downtown at the Montreal Eaton Centre — a busy and productive retail complex that will merge with adjacent Complexe Les Ailes to form a new shopping centre. As well, a location at Premium Outlets Montreal will open at a date to be determined, likely replacing the existing Hudson’s Bay outlet anchor retail space.
Saks OFF 5TH has announced five new Canadian stores that will open in full-priced, traditional shopping centres. This is different from its U.S. locations, which are primarily in outlet malls or freestanding. In December of 2016, Saks announced that it would open an OFF 5TH location at West Vancouver’s Park Royal, and in October of 2016 it announced openings at Pickering Town Centre and at Bramalea City Centre — both of which are traditional malls in suburban Toronto. All three are scheduled to open in the summer of 2017. Saks OFF 5TH’s choice for retail space in Canada varies, ranging from power centres (such as Edmonton’s South Edmonton Common) to department store shop-in-stores, such as within Hudson’s Bay’s downtown Ottawa location. The shop-in-shop is unique to Canada as well, though at one time Saks OFF 5TH shared space with full-priced Saks Fifth Avenue stores in downtown Minneapolis and suburban Detroit (Fairlane Town Centre) — with both full-priced Saks stores having since closed.
The CF Galeries d’Anjou store is the 18th confirmed Saks OFF 5TH location in Canada, with nine of those stores already being open. The Hudson’s Bay Company plans to open/operate 25 Canadian Saks OFF 5TH locations by 2018 — the same year that Nordstrom Rack will enter Canada. The two concepts will compete for Canadian’s value-priced dollars, with Nordstrom Rack expecting to open between 15 and 20 Canadian locations over the next several years. Competitor TJX, operating Winners and Marshalls in Canada, also continues to rapidly open stores nationwide.
Saks Fifth Avenue also recently announced that it would open a 200,000 square foot full-priced Saks store in Montreal in early 2018, located within the existing downtown Montreal Hudson’s Bay store. It will include an 80,000 square foot ‘Quebec themed’ food hall as well as 120,000 square feet of fashion retail.
Similarly, you also see Winners and Homesense stores in traditional malls in Canada, whereas in the US, their counterparts, TJMaxx and Ross are typically in strip malls and outlet malls.
Very good point, actually. Canadian shopping centres are a bit different in that respect.