Tag Cloud
Friday, February 10, 2012
Retail recruiter starts downtown
by Suzanne Hurt, published on May 4, 2010 at 7:40 PM
Storyline: Downtown
Loading images
Valerie Mamone-Werder walked K Street Mall on a wet morning last week.
Wrapped in a black trench coat, Downtown Sacramento Partnership's new retail recruiter didn't seem to notice the dark clouds bulging with the day's next rainstorm. She seemed too full of excitement.
"I love all these old buildings," Mamone-Werder said, standing near a corner of 10th and K streets.
She pointed out what's happening near that important spot: the sophisticated vibe The Cosmopolitan cabaret, café and nightclub have brought to a corner once inhabited by Woolworth's, and the work under way nearby to turn a former Hit or Miss clothing store into Dive Bar and Pizza Rock. She also discussed the potential for the empty space between the two businesses that once housed a Rite Aid and the vacant Roos-Atkins Building at 1001 K St., later renamed K Street West.
Mamone-Werder, a former Midtown boutique owner, started April 6 as the property-based improvement district's first retail recruiter. The move to create the position was recommended by Downtown Works, a Washington, D.C., retail consultancy firm that analyzed retail in the J-K-L corridor. The report indicated that downtown needs to improve retail to start thriving again.
Her job will be to help shrink the number of vacancies, upgrade the mix of retail, and support existing business owners within the 66-block business district. At the top of her list will be developing better relationships with business and property owners, developers and brokers.
"It's not just re-tenanting. It's about what we can do to help you as a business owner be more successful," said DSP Executive Director Michael Ault.
Mamone-Werder said her experience as a local retail business owner will allow her to help retail store owners. She has been at her job for a month, but she's lived in Sacramento for 22 years. She owned a women's clothing store called Blush Boutique at 2317 J St. for five years, until closing the store in April 2009.
"I understand what it's like to start from ground zero and build a business," she said.
Mamone-Werder plans to scout out successful retail districts in other areas to see what's working. She's visited Portland's Pearl District and will tour a thriving section of Nashville during a business recruiter's conference later this month.
Another part of her job will be to recruit entrepreneurial business owners with "independent" store models who want to locate in unique, sometimes historic buildings — rather than the kind of chains that set up the exact same store in a mass-saturation retail campaign. She will also help those business owners find space downtown.
She envisions more open-air markets selling fresh food, an independent bookstore, home accessory stores and a variety of unique clothing stores to appeal to various age groups, tastes and incomes. For instance, something like the Lizard Lounge, a Portland clothing store that is as much a hangout as it is a retailer, with a ping-pong table, couches and computers sharing space with clothes racks.
Mamone-Werder will also create an available property database that is more detailed and current than other real estate databases for downtown properties, including CoStar. She's finished viewing all the building exteriors in the district. She's begun meeting with business and property owners and brokers, and touring property interiors to collect more personalized information. She's also recruiting help with keeping the database up to date.
She's just starting to ask for everyone's help to make DSP's vision for downtown a reality.
"I feel like people are waiting for some big 'something' to happen," Mamone-Werder said. "And I don't know if that's going to happen, or if we all need to come together and just take a risk to make it happen."
Suzanne Hurt is a staff reporter covering business and development for The Sacramento Press.
Conversation Express your views,
debate, and be heard with those in your area closest
to the issue.
Leave a Comment
There is an enormous potential to convert these lofty spaces into REAL lofts, rather than the contrivances that have been erected recently in the Midtown/Downtown area. It would also spare precious dollars from costly new construction and creatively re-use existing buildings thus expanding their lifespans.
K Street hasn’t had an expression of its own nature as a street for nearly a half a decade, when the first ‘malling of America’ attempts took place – not by government (though the government paid for it) but at the behest of property owners seeking to capitalize on available redevelopment funds. Since that time the Street has been a disaster of malappropriate design that condemned the street to an almost minimalist faux-Corbusian use executed woefully, and now, after revision after revision aimed at revitalization, the ‘city beautiful’ ideal once expressed exquisitely by the Bauhaus architects, will now be laid to rest just as the Corbu-inspired PRUITT IGOE of St. Louis was.
If people are to be a major component of a re-use plan, instead of the mishmash of retail/nightlife/gummintoffice/etc. as has been planned, it will, unfortunately for some, require automobile access at least – whether that’s via the alley network, or directly on the Street itself, which has been sanctioned by the City Council now…
But I believe this people/residential component allowing at least some limited auto access, and reusing existing structures, some of which are historic, rather than implementing costly new structures, could provide the human component for far more hours in the day compared to today’s use. K Street was once vital – anyone of my generation who was fortunate to have seen movies at the old Fox or Crest theaters, tasting the wafting of KarmelKorn air at the entrance, knows just how exciting it used to be to go ‘downtown'…
Despite recent perceptions to the contrary, even the Downtown Plaza’s build added excitement for nearly two decades, and though Westfield is now a pariah landlord here (to some – certainly not to me) prior to market shifts and economic quakes the Downtown Plaza itself was a great place that could have been greater.
Tastes and inclinations and marketplaces have changed since then, but I believe it is this people component, this residential thing, reusing precious existing space, some of which is in historic edifaces, that can humanize K Street once more, revitalizing this dormant block to something more modern and useful, while providing much needed housing, if creatively implemented at a reasonable cost…
It's encouraging that there are plans "to recruit entrepreneurial business owners with "independent" store models who want to locate in unique, sometimes historic buildings — rather than the kind of chains that set up the exact same store in a mass-saturation retail campaign."