A north Edmonton mall will be the first in Canada to see the revival of the Zellers department store and first to fill a former Hudson’s Bay space, the shopping centre’s owner said Thursday.
Henry Zavriyev, the chief executive officer of Londonderry Mall owner Leyad, said the opening of the new Zellers on Monday will be a soft launch after Hudson’s Bay cleared out of the space at retail centre’s south end two months ago.
Leyad said in a media release it will be the first landlord in the country to secure a tenant for an ex-Bay store since the former Canadian department store giant closed its locations at the end of June.
Zavriyev said Zellers, which will occupy about 60,000 square feet on the main floor of Londonderry’s former Bay space, will offer “a lot of home goods and various clothing for men, women and kids” and will bring back its mascot, Zeddy the teddy bear.
He said residents of the neighbourhood that surrounds Londonderry Mall are “exactly the kind that would want to shop at a Zellers.”
“The community is made up of a lot of families. There’s a school (across the street). It’s very residential,” he told CTV News Edmonton on Thursday. “We think that the kind of products that Zellers sells serve the community well and are good for the mall.”
Zavriyev wouldn’t say who was behind the opening of the new Zellers store.
The Hudson’s Bay Company, which declared bankruptcy in the spring, sold its name and trademarks to Canadian Tire in May for $30 million, including Zellers’ ‘Lowest Price Is The Law’ slogan.
Canadian Tire, which told CTV News Edmonton on Thursday it did not purchase the Zellers brand, beat out 13 other bidders who wanted the intellectual property belonging to what was the country’s oldest company.
Hudson’s Bay opened pop-up Zellers stores inside 25 of their department stores two years ago, including at Edmonton’s Kingsway Mall and Southgate locations. The parent Bay closed most Zellers locations in 2013, shuttering the final two in 2020.
With files from CTV News Edmonton’s Evan Kenny and The Canadian Press
