New Zellers officially opens at Edmonton’s Londonderry Mall

After several delays, Zellers once again has an Edmonton location after the Londonderry mall store opened Thursday. CTV News Edmonton's Marek Tkach reports.

Zellers is alive, again.

The revived department store opened its first location at Edmonton’s Londonderry Mall when the shopping centre opened Thursday morning.

The new-format retailer will occupy 60,000 square feet on one floor of the northside mall’s store space that once hosted Hudson’s Bay, the historic Canadian store that closed the doors of its locations across the country at the end of June.

The new Zellers will feature goods such as apparel, home goods, seasonal items and luggage while using a smaller footprint than its predecessor.

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The Londonderry location is the first former Bay space in Canada for which a new retail store has been announced. It was first slated to open on Aug. 29 then Sept. 1, but its opening was pushed into October.

Hudson’s Bay transferred Zellers trademarks in early August to Les Ailes de la Mode Inc., which is run by business mogul Isaac Benitah. Benitah and his family have run home goods chains Bombay and Bowring as well as clothing chains Fairweather and International Clothiers.

While Joey Benitah, the chief executive officer of Zellers, hasn’t revealed how many stores the company hopes to open, he said he “absolutely plans on bringing Zellers back to every major market across Canada in a relatively short time.”

Benitah initially targeted former HBC properties and has been signing leases with landlords for single floors or portions of the space the department store once held that measure no more than 50,000 square feet.

“We don’t need 250,000 square feet, 200,000 square feet. That’s not our vision for the future of Zellers,” Benitah said. “There’s a lot of space in these former Hudson’s Bay stores that we’re not going to be occupying.”

RELATED STORIES:

• Revived Zellers at Londonderry Mall to open at end of month
• New Zellers store to open in Edmonton mall’s former Hudson’s Bay space
• What could be in store for Edmonton’s vacant Hudson’s Bay spaces

With files from The Canadian Press