Retail giant Briscoe Group is boosting its Auckland offering with three new stores

Thursday, 11 October 2018

A new Briscoe Group head office and store under is construction on the corner of Taylors Rd and Morningside Drive in Morningside, Auckland.

Briscoe Group will close the gaps in its Auckland coverage with the addition of three new stores, at Morningside, Silverdale and Mount Roskill in the next two years, managing director Rod Duke says.

The three developments will add about 6600 square metres of new Briscoes homewares retail space and about 4600sqm of Rebel Sports.

'It (Auckland) won't be the place with the biggest gaps once we do Taylors Road, Taylors Road , Mt Roskill, Silverdale. Has it been up until now? Yes we think it probably has been,' Duke said

The lack of large sites had been an issue. Some sites needed to be nearly two acress - one acre to house a store of nearly 4000sqm, and almost as much space again for car parking, he said.

Rod Duke, managing director of Briscoe Group, said developing three new stores in Auckland would close gaps in its coverage.

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The Briscoes store at 36 Taylors Rd, Morningside, Auckland, will be demolished late in 2019 to make way for a larger new Briscoes store.

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Two new Briscoes buildings will be completed in Taylors Road, Morningside, in the next two years. The first is being built now on the corner of Taylors Road and Morningside Drive.

It would house the new head office bringing together seven different Auckland offices and it would temporarily be home to the Briscoes shop now located up the road at 36 Taylors Road.

Duke said once the new building was completed, about the third quarter of 2019, staff from the existing head office at 36 Taylors and other offices plus the Briscoes shop at 36 Taylors would shift to the new corner building which comprised about 2000sqm of office space and 2000sqm of retail.

The new Briscoe head office and store on the corner of Taylors Road and Morningside Drive will be about 4000 square metres.

Then 36 Taylors would be demolished and a new larger Briscoes homewares shop would be built on the site.

The 36 Taylors shop was one if its oldest, closest to the city, in a dense residential area, and very well known but now too small.

'It's always a good idea we think, if a shop performs well and you are going to renovate it, to put it back where it was because sometimes you can go across the street and you can lose half your business,' Duke said.

He expected by the end of 2019 36 Taylors would be demolished and the new building would take the best part of 2020 to complete.

The new Briscoe store there would be about 2800sqm, about 1200sqm bigger than the previous store, and he expected to open it to the public towards the end of 2020.

A Rebel Sports store would then move into the 2000sqm retail space on the corner of Taylors and Morningside Drive.

Over at Mount Roskill on Carr Road adjacent to Bunnings, planning was underway for a new, just under 4000sqm store accommodating Briscoes homewares and Rebel Sports side by side as well as back-office facilities, he said.

A lease agreement had been signed with the owner of a building to complete substantial conversion to a retail premise. The stores would serve the catchment of Mount Roskill, Onehunga and Mangere and were expected to open late 2019 or early 2020.

As well, resource consent had been obtained to build a new shop at Silverdale, which was the new northern boundary of Auckland for shopping nowadays, Duke said. The site was directly below Countdown and immediately adjacent to the new Farmers store in Silverdale.

The new outlet of also just under 4000sqm would house a Briscoes and a Rebel Sport side by side and the company hoped to open them for trade in early 2020. The two stores would service all the new areas like Wainui, Millwater, and Whangaparaoa.

Bringing Briscoes and Rebel under one roof in side by side stores provided 'fabulous economies', Duke said. Typically the company required a catchment of about 30,000 people to set up a new store.

'Briscoes can survive on about 30,000 or less. Rebel typically needs a little more than 30,000 but we can exercise some economies if it's alongside a Briscoes.'