Serial entrepreneur Paul Simon, founder of YDE — which is now owned by Truworths — and Arie Fabian, previously of the Fabiani chain have partnered with Old Mutual Property to create a new retail store concept called We Are EGG.
When I looked at the mall environment, I found it was really ubiquitous. It was just the same offering. It doesn’t matter how many centres we visited, all of them had the same type of offering. The mall environment lacked creativity and innovators and, in particular, small and medium enterprises had been excluded.
Their saying behind the partnership was that we would be the operators to bring local brands and small businesses into malls and in turn allow them to support small business. One thing that we’ve heard time and time again is that e-commerce is cannibalising the market and brick and mortar retail is dead or dying. I disagree. The data shows that e-commerce works optimally alongside brick and mortar stores.