Edina’s Southdale Center opens dedicated wing for luxury stores

It’s a new era for the first enclosed mall in America.

Seven new luxury retailers are set to open for business this year at Southdale Center in Edina as a part of a high-end retail wing.

The addition opened Thursday morning: a quiet, well-lit hall just off the mall’s main atrium on the south side of the complex. Only one store was open — jewelry brand David Yurman, which moved from the nearby Galleria — but floor-to-ceiling posters bearing the names of other well-known tenants promised more shopping soon.

The seven stores coming to the wing, and their tentative opening dates, are:

Tom Hanchar, VP of leasing at Simon Property Group, which owns Southdale, said the expansion is part of an effort to make the mall an experience. Other offerings include a Life Time health club, a mini-golf course/restaurant and nearby apartments.

“You have groceries, you have Life Time, you have hotels, you have entertainment and we have residential, all here on Southdale,” he said. “So when we looked at this project as a whole, we really looked at it as, ‘what can we do in totality to make it a great lifestyle center?’”

Allison Evans, manager at David Yurman, said the store had already made a few sales Thursday morning and customers seemed excited about the addition.

“They love the new design, they love how light it is,” she said. There is “a lot of natural sunlight in the mall in general, and they’re just very impressed with the revisions.”

She said the new retail offerings could help differentiate the mall among other retail options.

“We haven’t had a true luxury retail destination here in Minneapolis for a while, so I think the community deserves that,” she said.

The luxury tenants are a part of a plan to add 50 new high-end stores to the mall as a whole over the next year, about a third of which don’t currently have a location in the Twin Cities. Other new additions include Aritzia, Reformation, Vuori and Ralph Lauren.

Seth Ketron, a professor of marketing at the University of St. Thomas, said that many malls are reacting to the emergence of mixed-use spaces — buildings or areas that incorporate commercial, retail, residential and elements — by trying to make the mall a destination experience.

“There’s something we call the principle of cumulative attraction, so the more attractive things you add individually into a group, the more attractive the group as a whole is, beyond the sum of its parts,” he said. “I think a lot of retailers are trying to build on that principle, appealing to different kinds of consumers and even different kinds of experiences people are looking for.”