Chanel, Rimowa delay new stores, Prada moving out, sales plummet at Moncler, Gucci – will Hong Kong become city of ‘ghost malls’?
- As the unrest in Hong Kong continues, some luxury brands are preferring to pay high rents for empty spaces instead of opening planned new stores
- Landlords, who for years have been able to charge very high rents, are realising that they will have to compromise to keep their tenants
“Opening soon,” says the white hoarding covering a Chanel Beauty store on the aptly named Fashion Walk, a retail area normally teeming with shoppers in Hong Kong’s Causeway Bay district. The shop, which has looked like this for nearly four months, is just one of many whose openings have been significantly delayed by recent anti-government protests, adding to the increasing number of empty storefronts appearing in the city’s retail enclaves.
Last week, malls including the Landmark in Central and Sogo in Causeway Bay were closed almost every day as radicals have adopted a new strategy: cripple the city on weekdays instead of confining protests to weekends, as they had previously done.
What this means is that brands are willing to keep stores vacant while paying exorbitant monthly rents to avoid the added costs that come with opening a physical shop.
