EM speaks to Centre Director of Dundrum Town Centre, Don Nugent, about the unique challenges presented by one of Europe’s largest retail and town centre developments.
The south Dublin village of Dundrum was synonymous with traffic congestion for almost as long as we have had traffic reports on the radio. The tiny village with its picturesque, but extremely narrow, single main street became the hub for massive population growth in the early 1970s and achieved near legendary status for its rush hour traffic jams.
Hardly the place to put one of Europe’s largest shopping destinations then? Dundrum Town Centre’s Don Nugent responded to this description, “Dundrum is not simply a shopping centre, it is a town centre and that point of difference is key to its success,” he contends. “By Christmas we will have 31 cafes and restaurants here out of 130 or so outlets. This is a far greater proportion than you would find in any shopping centre.
“Between September and Christmas this year, 12 new stores and restaurants will have opened including the worldfamous toy store Hamleys, as well as, Ireland’s first Bose, Gerry Weber and Snow + Rock stores. South Africa’s famous chicken restaurant, Nando’s and the USA’s The Counter will also debut at Dundrum. Ananda recently opened their fine Indian restaurant in association with Atul Kochhar, the UK’s first Michelin Star-winning Indian chef and Roly’s will make a welcome return in November. In addition to these, Hughes & Hughes have opened a 10,000 sq ft book store and Elverys will open Ireland’s largest sports store with 24000 sq ft in December.
“This underlines our town centre status as does our focus on entertainment and leisure with the cinemas, the RTÉ production studio, the adult education facilities, Citizens Information Centre and the Mill Theatre which enjoys 20% higher occupancy than city centre theatres.”
These numbers are fairly impressive but they pale into insignificance when it comes to the scale of the centre. At present it is 1.2 million square foot in size and occupies the southern edge of Dundrum village. When its second phase – involving the redevelopment of the old Dundrum shopping centre and the western side of Main Street – is complete in 2013 this will have risen to a quite staggering 1.8 million square feet.
In excess of 16 million visitors are expected through the doors of the centre this year with some 67% of them coming by car. Visitor numbers reach a crescendo during Christmas week when half a million are expected. To put these numbers in context, the car park had 30% more cars in 2007.
And then there’s the electricity bill which amounts to around €1 million a year – and this is for the centre and its public areas alone, the individual outlets have their own electricity accounts. There is a strong focus on energy efficiency and reduction at the centre. Nugent defers to Facilities Manager Ken McIntosh, on this subject. “We have been helped greatly in our efforts to cut down on consumption by the ESB,” he says. “Our ESB Customer Supply , account manager, Frank McManus, has also been enormously helpful. Through consultation and other energy saving initiatives we have cut our consumption by about 7% over the past year. This is a very significant achievement, particularly when the rising cost of energy is taken into account.”
McIntosh also has high praise for the GEM web based account monitoring system. Gem is both a financial management system and a consumption and load monitoring tool specifically designed for multiple electricity accounts “This is an extremely useful tool,” he says. “It enables me to look at our usage and compare it to other time periods and assists in our efforts to cut down on electricity usage.”
Air conditioning accounts for a relatively high proportion of electricity usage at the centre and is therefore a focus for conservation efforts. “We have asked ourselves some questions and made savings as a result,” McIntosh points out. “We asked if we really needed the environment in the centre to be at optimal levels at 9am in the morning and if we needed to continue at those levels until we close at 9pm in the evening.” In order words, by switching on the system later and switching it off earlier considerable savings have been made.
The energy conservation efforts also extend to the individual tenants. This is because the centre incurs costs in terms of disposing the heat generated by the individual air conditioning systems in each unit. “We work with them to help them become more aware of their energy usage and its impact. For example, lighting in the stores generates heat and we encourage them to use more energy efficient lighting.”
There is an interesting confluence between the energy conservation efforts of the centre’s management and their overall approach to meeting the many other challenges presented by 16 million customers. One example is the successful smoothing of shopping patterns throughout the week.
“When we said we were going to open until 9pm every weekday evening many people said it wouldn’t work,” says Nugent. “But as a town centre we wanted to extend out from the normal late shopping nights of Thursdays and Fridays and give our customers more convenience and choice. We now have the very unusual situation where our footfall from Monday to Wednesday is higher than at weekends. Our highest average spend is now on Monday and Tuesday evenings and we got our highest conversion rates on those nights as well.”
The normal statistics for centres would be 40% footfall on weekends with 32% from Monday to Wednesday. (Footfall is the number of people passing through the centre over a given period of time). In Dundrum the figures are 35% and 38% respectively. “This gives us fewer peaks and troughs and less bottlenecks,” Nugent notes. It also means that the centre’s energy usage per customer is fairly evenly spread throughout the week with very little wastage.
Nugent is determinedly optimistic despite the current economic downturn. “We have achieved footfall increases of around 10% each year since we opened in 2005 and we are set to achieve in excess of 6% this year,” he says. “Many of our tenants report to us that their Dundrum stores are their top performers at present and that they are achieving their highest conversion rates here. I believe this is mainly because we are a town centre, not just a shopping centre. People come here to eat, to be entertained in the cinema, the theatre or the night club; they come to meet friends and so on. We will endeavour to create more points of difference in order to give our visitors plenty of reasons to return to Dundrum.”
