Upper Canada Mall in Newmarket, Ontario has opened a number of new stores recently to meet the retail demand of a burgeoning community.
“Upper Canada Mall is experiencing an extraordinary amount of growth, with even more brands that we love closer to our York Region homes,” said Ryan Da Silva, General Manager & Director, Upper Canada Mall. “These new store openings represent a notable expansion of our fashion, lifestyle and home and décor categories, giving the community more reasons than ever to shop close to home.”
The new brands at Upper Canada Mall include the highly-anticipated MANGO, Canadian jewelers Hillberg & Berk’s first GTA location and trendy lifestyle store MINISO, along with Jill Yoga, Oscar Wylee, Nails for You and Athleta. Build-A-Bear also joined these retailers in mid-November, just in time for the peak holiday shopping season, and in December Fox Home, Hickory Farms and Tommy Gun’s Original Barbershop will be opening.
Upper Canada is the premiere shopping destination in Newmarket, Ontario located just 30 minutes north of Toronto. Co-owned by Oxford Properties Group and CPP Investment Board (CPPIB) and managed by Oxford Properties Group, Upper Canada is an award-winning shopping centre featuring more than 200 stores in one million square feet of retail space, including Zara, lululemon, Apple, Aritzia, Sephora, MAC, Michael Kors and Market & Co. – a 40,000-square-foot market concept with fresh, local and convenient food and dining offerings. The shopping centre is on two levels.
“Upper Canada Mall offers the most exceptional shopping and dining experience north of Toronto,” said DaSilva. “We’re located in Newmarket and Upper Canada is a super regional shopping centre that draws in young families from one of the fastest growing and most affluent residential markets in Ontario. The York region is one of the fastest growing regions in all of Canada.
“We’ve seen a ton of growth at the shopping centre. We have a number of new key brands that have located here at the shopping centre or who have renovated and grown,” said DaSilva. “So thus far this year, year over year, we are seeing a 26 per cent increase in customer traffic at Upper Canada Mall.”
He said the mall closed out 2022 with the addition of two key anchors in LCBO and Winners. A lot of the mall’s traffic has been drawn from that.
“We’re about 98 per cent occupancy at the shopping centre,” added DaSilva.
“The shopping centre world is quite dynamic and it’s like a game of chess where we’re moving around pieces, those puzzle pieces, to ensure that tenants are in the right size space, in the right location, alongside their co-tenants.
“There’s a lot of key retailers who expanded and needed more space to ensure that they could provide their full product offering and so that’s where a lot of these relocations came from. Some of these new tenants filled spaces as we shuffled some tenants around.”
Tell us about all the other stores that shutdown in UCM because they can’t afford the ridiculous rents. How covid destroyed so many and lack of customers. How many more will be shutting down.
This mall is now for cityits. It is now longer a place for the community to shop. Too many high end stores, over priced shopping and impossible parking. Back in the day it was a fun place to bring the family on a Friday night. Walk around The Bay and have the kids play while you had a coffee. There are very few stores I even care to shop at but it is too much work to fight the parking. Putting the LCBO in there was without a doubt, the stupist thing ever. I have not been to the mall in 4 years and I am local. The dynamic of what Upper Canada Mall was has been destroyed and you have fed in to all the foreign money that has come to the area. This is no longer for the community, clearly it’s about the revenue. There is nothing about this place that supports local, I will take my business elsewhere.