Landlord, franchiser team up to lure franchisees to mall

By Staff Writer
SCT Week- June 26th, 2009

Westfield America and Atlanta-based Flip Flop Shops have launched a pilot marketing program that seeks to reduce vacant spaces in the former’s malls by attracting new franchisees for the latter.

The partners met this spring at RECon and hatched a plan to place barricades highlighting Flip Flop franchise opportunities in front of vacant retail space at Westfield malls. “We felt like this is a great way for them to fill space and for us to find franchisees,” said Flip Flop CEO Darin Kraetsch. “We have a good relationship with Westfield, and we talked about an out-of-the-box idea in hopes of getting people walking through the mall that are entrepreneurs looking for their next venture, or a guy who has worked at IBM for the last 20 years and has decided he wants to control his own destiny.”

The first of these barricades, 15 feet high by 17 feet wide, will be unveiled next week at Westfield Palm Desert, in Palm Springs, Calif. Two more are to appear in California in coming weeks, at Westfield Oakridge, in San Jose, and the Galleria at Roseville, in Sacramento.
“We talked about locations we felt would be good for the concept and combined that with malls where they had vacancies they were looking to fill,” Kraetsch said. “We felt three malls would give us a good test of what the response will be.”

Flip Flop Shops, which was established in 2004 and began franchising last year, is the first retail chain to exclusively sell sandals and flip-flops. It operates 10 stores across four states and in Canada and Guam, but Kraetsch cites plans to have 236 units up by 2013. “Our intention,” he said, “is to do for flip-flops what Sunglass Hut did for sunglasses.”

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