First-born: Forum (March 2003) on Elgin Road

Open space: City Centre (June 2004) in Salt Lake

Chic pick: South City Mall (January 2008) on Anwar Shah Road

Wait and Watch? Mani Square (June 2008) off EM Bypass

Pranay Sinha has not studied medicine. But terms like surgical intervention and medicinal cure are part of his trade. He saves the lives of not humans, but of retail spaces. Or species, should we say?

“Mall doctors” — Sinha of Star Centres, who creates “physical retail environments”, another name for mall space, doesn’t agree with the label too much, but is called one — are in demand. He has also been called a “mall messiah”. “We are known to step in and turn things around. I guess that’s why they call me the mall doctor,” says Sinha, who though based in New Delhi, is acutely aware of Calcutta malls. He has worked on a Calcutta mall, at the conceptual stage, not as a “doctor”.

The evolution of malls is leading to new professions and practices. And also a lot of jargon.

Calcutta has engaged its share of “doctors” in its malls. In the city they have mostly performed “plastic surgery”, to change sick malls into office spaces.

For example, Gariahat Mall now houses the office of Star Ananda. Access through a lane was a problem with the mall. Says Manish Agarwal, a consultant who looks after the retail wing of real estate consultants Pioneer Property Management Ltd: “Also the tenancy mix was bad, the planning was wrong and there was no multiplex, so it didn’t draw the cinema-viewing crowd either.”

Tenancy mix? It means the mix of brands at a mall. “We attack the retail planning from the occupancy perspective and the occupancy from the retail point. Usually, the architect and the marketing teams work in isolation, but that is not our style,” says Sinha.

It means that the layout of the mall is designed keeping in mind the brands.

Expert eye

When not in the prescriptive mode, mall experts are tracking every mall in the country and deciding what’s right and what’s wrong. Malls are being constantly critiqued for the next mall to be more sophisticated.

The idea of a mall begins with conducting a “feasibility study”, identifying the “catchment area” (that’s the newer, better word for target market), coming up with a design that ensures maximum utilisation of space and visibility to each brand and then getting the right product mix and conferring with the brands to get them to the mall.

Then the study begins. Kishore Biyani of Future Group, which owns Pantaloons, used to spend time at each of his stores to study the shoppers. Manish Agarwal says that retailers felt that among Indian women there was a sense of achievement in beating the fellow shopper to get something. The aisles in the stores are designed in such a way that there is this sense of exploring and brushing past other customers to reach what the woman customer “needs”, whether she would agree with this line of thought or not!

Of the Big Four in Calcutta — Forum, City Centre, South City Mall and Mani Square — Forum seems to be what a mall shouldn’t be planned as. On the face of it, at least.

Zones and boxes

Forum, Calcutta’s first mall, was a “destination” when it opened. People would travel from across the city to hang out at the mall. But today it’s considered a “neighbourhood mall”, as it has a local customer base.

It doesn’t have any formal “zoning” either.

Zoning is the practice of dividing each floor according to specific retail categories, says Kalyan Ghosh of NAI NK Realtors. One of the main reasons for the food court, restaurant and plexes to be on the higher floors is because the rentals are less compared to lower floors, he adds.

Zoning, in fact, is getting a lot of attention. Rehan Huck of JLL Meghraj, Delhi, believes that since the restaurants and plexes guarantee a steady flow, having them on the higher floor ensures that people have to travel to the other floors and see the stores before they reach. It increases chances of sale.

But Forum doesn’t have zoning as it is very small and was initially not planned as a mall at all. It was designed as a conventional commercial office building with showrooms on the lower floors. It was only after shopping malls came up in other cities that this concept was tried and became the talk of the town, says Agarwal.

Vertical split

There’s more about Forum. Ghosh of NK Realtors defines it as a typically “first generation box format mall”.

In contrast, Abhijit Das of Lemongrass Advisers says, City Centre does not comply with the “closed box design”. Thus the consumer gets a feeling of exploring it every time he or she visits the mall.

Forum has yet another mistake built into it. It remains a “vertical mall” when space is in. Das believes that City Centre’s spacious design helps generate a high number of repeat visits.

South City is unanimously accepted as the most chic mall in the city. It is considered modern and functional. .

The design of the mall, says Manish Agarwal, is functional and care has been taken over infrastructure, utilisation of space and aesthetics, which add up to a look and feel of grandeur, which is said to be part of the new age mall.

The “zoning” is right, most experts feel. South City also offers good parking facility and an interesting “tenancy mix”, with top national and some international brands.

Though smaller in size, Mani Square offers similar luxuries to the visitors. The mall is designed well and the shops look good. It will be a winner in the long run, feels Das.

Manish Agarwal has problems with the place. The mall is not easily accessible to the pedestrian. Plus, the “anchor store” (the store that occupies the biggest space in a floor) is not positioned right. The two sets of escalators take the visitors up or down even before they have approached the anchor, which is not a good idea, he says.

But the city itself has several problems for malls to thrive.

The downturn has affected everyone, but it has never been easy for mall consultants to sell Calcutta. “That’s because of the traditional image of Calcutta as price-sensitive, which makes it hard work for the consultant to get the brands to come to the mall,” says Manish Agarwal.

The geographical boundary of urban Calcutta is too small to accept a large number of malls, he adds. There are also many big standalone departmental stores and markets.

Retail school

So the mall talk grows.

Meanwhile, Future Group is even set to open a retail institute in Rajarhat soon, which will offer floor training at first and would probably venture into retail management studies later.

At the same time, it may be interesting to bear in mind that certain things happen despite theory. That’s primarily because of the human factor, which, so far, has not really been classified by any theory.

Sinha equates a mall with Bollywood. With a film, there might be the formula girl- meet-boy story, but success depends a lot on luck.

So despite theory, Forum remains a hit till date. And though City Centre may get high footfalls, some retailers believe that because of its division into blocks and many entry and exit points, a visitor can completely ignore the stores and just hang out or go straight to the plexes or to eat.

Perhaps theory would not apply fully to the malls in Calcutta because they are much more than malls. They are spots people really like to visit in a city that is starved of places to go to for fun.