Wellness Warehouse Pulls Out of Joburg's Heathway Square
Jan 28 2009
Retail Wrap >>

Wellness Warehouse closed its Johannesburg store on Christmas Eve as a tough consumer market and poor location combined to make it unviable for the big box health and beauty retailer.

The two Cape Town stores would continue trading, said managing director Sean Gomes. He and his brother Carlos launched the concept in 2007, before the sharp fall in consumer discretionary spend.

Gomes said the Heathway Square mall in Johannesburg was a poor site that had attracted the wrong target market for the upper-end brand, which retails environmentally friendly cosmetics and offers beauty treatments. It was also costly to market a new brand with only one store in the city.

Gomes said Wellness Warehouse had retrenched 60 staff with the closure, leaving a total of 120 staff in the company.

The company had not given up on Johannesburg, but would seek out a more established shopping centre next time.

Wellness Warehouse seeks to consolidate the fragmented alternative health store market with its big format, 2 000m2 stores. It also offers a conventional pharmacy. One of its Cape Town stores is located in the busy Cavendish Square mall in Claremont; the other is in the Lifestyles strip mall on Kloof in the City Bowl.

Gomes was confident of the long-term trend towards healthy and environmentally sustainable living that Wellness Warehouse tapped into, resulting in a future for the retail concept. But for now many consumers had become nervous, going into survival mode and shopping with familiar brands, he said.

Wellness Warehouse product categories include fast-selling, health-related goods; toiletries and beauty products; and more discretionary items such as electrical massage equipment.

The Gomes family previously owned home improvement group De La Rey before selling it to Massmart in 2005.

Adapted from Source: http://espaces.wordpress.com, 20 January 2009