Seven new stores brighten Silver Sands' horizon

MIRAMAR BEACH — The leasing team at Silver Sands Factory Stores is on a roll.

Seven stores, including several that have never operated in Northwest Florida before, either have opened recently or are scheduled to open in coming weeks.

Fashion store DKNY returned to Silver Sands last month after being away for years. White House Black Market, another women’s fashion store, opened last week.

Five other stores catering to different demographics are expected to open in the next two to three weeks.

“All these retailers are making their regional debuts into Northwest Florida here at Silver Sands, and I think that speaks volumes to the power of this market,” said Angela Triplett, public relations manager for Silver Sands. “Overall, it puts our area on the map for the entire country.”

New stores coming to Silver Sands are the luxury luggage store Tumi, the hiking boot company Merrell, the 32 Degrees Yogurt Bar, men’s and women’s clothing store Esprit and the first outlet for Ann Taylor’s LOFT store in Northwest Florida.

“I think it was probably fortuitous and serendipitous in a way,” Art Butterfield, Silver Sands’ vice president of leasing, said of the seven stores opening so close together. “We had our difficulties like every region and center had with the economic downturn.”

Butterfield said those difficulties included having a handful of the center’s national tenants, such as Liz Claiborne, closing all of their stores even though their Silver Sands’ locations had been performing well.

Despite the economic slump, sales at Silver Sands were up slightly last year. The center had 7.1 million shoppers.

“When a whole company goes down, it doesn’t matter if they have one good store,” Butterfield said. “The closing of these stores, although a gray cloud that day, had a silver lining because it allowed us to do some repositioning.”

Butterfield said he has pursued some of the new stores for the entire four-plus years he has worked at Silver Sands. The closing of some stores and the relocation of others helped provide the space needed to bring in the new stores, he said.

“It’s really quite an impressive list of retailers that we’ve added to the center and the market,” Butterfield said.

With the new stores arriving, Butterfield said the center is now 92 percent occupied. Most of the vacant space comes from stores to the north and south of Saks Fifth Avenue that is hard to see and a 12,000-square-foot anchor space.

In addition to the five stores opening next month, Bare Essentials is expected to open later this summer.