These days, while driving north of Beirut on the highway towards Jounieh and Byblos, one encounters a big, blue structure on the side of the road, on the exact spot where the ABC store used to be. Written on the outside, in lettering so bold that one could easily overlook the department store’s logo, it proclaims “Kidsville — the largest kingdom just for kids!
” Behind the blue cover is ABC Dbayye’s transmogrification from an ugly duckling into a pretty swan.
When the Lebanese retail company was faced with the fact that its oldest store was showing the wear and tear of long years in service and was in dire need of an overhaul, it had two alternatives: tearing down and re-building from scratch or renovating while keeping the store running.
As Ron Fadel, Vice President Leasing at ABC, explained, “we could not close the whole store for a year of renovation,” and thus only the second option was a viable one. The first part to be redone was the basement, which — re-invented as “Kidsville” — was opened again to the public in March 2008. Currently, both second and third floors are closed, and once they are re-opened in October of this year, the first and ground floors follow suit. Fadel expects all works to have been completed “by the end of 2009, beginning of 2010.”
The Kidsville concept, combining a plethora of retail aspects for children – clothing, shoes, jewelry, school supplies, toys, and even a child optician — in one space, is “the first of its kind in the region,” according to Fadel. Initially, he said, “we started with a much smaller Kids Wear section. But we soon felt, talking to potential talents, that there was a possibility to make a landmark for children in Lebanon and the region.”
Now, the children’s section covers the whole ground floor, totaling 8,000 square meters, and hosts 100 different brands, aiming to “offer everything that a Lebanese can currently have on the market.” Apart from apparel and school supplies, ABC is also in talks with local partners to open a children’s bookstore in Kidsville.
ABC, in its re-modeling of the Dbayye store, is consciously sticking to its roots as a department store, being open for the mall concept — many different stores under one roof — but trying to maintain as much of the old-style concept of grouping merchandise by type and not brand. As Fadel pointed out, this concept’s roots are not just in the European-style department stores like Galeries Lafayette, Harrod’s, and KaDeWe, but also in the region’s own historical retail space, the suq, where sellers of like wares — the coppersmiths, the carpenters, the spice salesmen — were, and are, always found together.
This is also observable in the ABC Ashrafieh Mall in Beirut, in which the company’s own department store occupies a major part. The concept seems to have found a positive resonance abroad, as ABC is getting offers to open up its trademark department stores in malls throughout the region and, indeed, just inaugurated its first venture abroad — a 4,200 square meter department store inside a mall in Amman, Jordan.
Asked about the future of malls and the current discussion about a time when the region will be “malled out”, Fadel answered that “It depends on the customer. Some want to go to a specific brand, to be in a specific brand environment. Others want the opposite — to be in an environment where they have the choice of many brands for the same goods. Both approaches are working. Both are here and will stay.”
ABC’s own plans echo those of many Lebanese businesses: regional expansion is on the drafting boards. Having weathered the last years of war and political crisis, during which the company has, nevertheless, managed to increase its revenues, the current focus is on the renovation of the Dbayye store, which will see its size almost double from 18,000 to 32,000 square meters, but the sights are already set further a field.
According to Fadel, the primary target area is the Levant — Lebanon, Syria, Jordan — but in five to ten years “ABC could be a company with several malls and department stores in more than three countries.”
