Experiential Retail Is Main Ingredient In Successful Mixed-Use Recipes In DFW

Experiential retail offerings have become a major ingredient in making mixed-use projects stand out among the sea of developments across Dallas-Fort Worth.

The region is a favorite for experiential retailers, boasting some of the first Netflix House, Meow Wolf and Cosm locations in the country, as well as being the launch site for the first live-action Minecraft Experience concept. These immersive concepts allow people to enjoy the company of others while having an experience unlike any they've had before, Arcadis Practice Group Director for Retail Michelle Devereaux said. 

“We have a population of humans who are looking to connect with people who, while it feels like the world is burning down in many ways, are looking to feel joy and hope and connection with the people around them,” Devereaux said during Bisnow's DFW Experiential Retail and Mixed-Use Summit on June 2 at Texas Live! in Arlington. “A really great experiential retail environment, mixed-use environment … is going to facilitate that.”

Experiential concepts stand out because of what WoodHouse principal W. Brandt Wood called the homogenization of retail across the country. Big-box retailers and other brand-name stores all look alike across cities and regions, so finding an authentic thread, whether architectural or cultural, can help tip the scales in consumers' eyes.  

Wood said he believes there is a place for national retailers in mixed-use projects, but it's important to have a healthy mix of stores that reflect the flavor of the area where the development is located. 

That’s a major theme for the $750M Haggard Farm mixed-use project that WoodHouse and Stillwater Capital broke ground on in Plano in December. The 130-acre project is slated to include 650K SF of office, 100K SF of retail, a 125-room boutique hotel, 800 multifamily units and more than 10 acres of green space on a farm that has been in the Haggard family since 1856.

The developers are working with broker teams at Retail Connection and CBRE to secure a mix of tenants that will attract daytime visitors and help drive evening traffic. Wood said he anticipates Haggard Farm will have music programming and different pop-up markets to help activate the development. 

Finding the right mix of retailers and experiences to entice shoppers to spend the day at a development is a major goal for most of the region’s mixed-use projects.

Restaurant operator FreeRange Concepts concentrates on engineering opportunities to draw in patrons during the week instead of focusing much effort on the busy weekends, owner and CEO Kyle Noonan said.

“Our focus really is on habit more than novelty because we feel like novelty will bring you once,” Noonan said. “But if you can form the ritual … of coming throughout the week, then that's really, in our opinion, a recipe for success.”

The key to a successful mixed-use development is creating the right feel for the project rather than focusing on a specific look, Devereaux said. The tenant mix should offer things lacking in the community and the streets should feel active, while also being safe and comfortable. 

"A lot of it is in the storytelling of the space and the orchestration of the journey of that end user through the space," Devereaux said. 

It’s also important to focus on what a development's target customers want and deliver that without getting distracted by other things, Noonan said. He pointed to the changes at Highland Park Village in Dallas as a prime example. 

That development once featured a grocery store but has since grown into the region’s premier destination for luxury retail. 

"They knew exactly what the customer that was going there was looking for, and they gave them only that," Noonan said. 

Successful mixed-use projects also often have their own brands that individual retailers can lean on, Devereaux said. Arcadis has seen health and wellness become an increasingly popular theme at many of the mixed-use projects it has worked on.

At the $3B The Mix project in Frisco, developers plan to include wide sidewalks and walking and biking trails around the mixed-use development, Devereaux said. 

"It's really becoming more and more integrated, even into that more urban setting as well,” she said. “People are looking to have spaces to get up and go and move their bodies, and I think we're going to see that a lot more."