On 19 Mar. ‘23. TATA Group’s Croma & Zudio joined Westside at Chennai Citi Centre mall, one of the newest malls in town to come up in the early 2000s. While Zudio and Croma are each spread over 9,000 sft in the ground floor, Westside is spread over 26,500 sft over the ground and first floors. Westside is located on the same area where once Lifestyle was placed, when the mall opened its doors. Croma has taken the centre stage in the ground floor facing the atrium and Zudio is right across. The other side of the mall, facing the road will have a Decathlon store coming up in April ‘23.
INOX has been operating here for over 15 years with 4 screens and they seem to have committed to renovate the auditoria in the coming months ahead of the festival season’s releases. The former foodcourt has been revamped and has a new set of tenants now, while KFC and McDonalds continue where they were located earlier. A dozen vanilla stores are expected to open before Tamil New Years Day on 14 April.
While the Spencers Plaza opened its doors in Chennai in the mid-90s, the first phase followed by the second, it was then the largest mall in Asia spread over 3 lakh sqft with a mixed use development including retail, food, corporate offices and a parking area to house over 100 cars, a novelty back then in India. Ansal Plaza in Delhi and Crossroads in Mumbai followed suit. But inall these malls, shop spaces were sold-out to indicvidual investors (like high streets), so maintenance of common areas detoriarated.
Enter Citi Centre. The swanky mall spread over 2.50 lakh sqft had everything that Chennai aspired to. However, the success was shortlived, with the opening of the Express Avenue Mall, abut 3kms away, which over 2.5 times in size. Though Lifestyle and INOX Cinemas remained for a long time, the profile of custtomers and visitors changed dramatically, leading to an exodus of premium brands. The owners, EMAAR Group from the Middle East, meanwhile had other issues to sort out back home, so the mall remain in neglect for several years.
Finally, the mall is now back to a new look and feel and with the TATA group brands being the main anchors, a new set of customers are expected to arrive at this once popular hangout, just 500 metres before the world famous Marina beach. Zudio operates over 290 stores and Westside, around 200 stores across India. Croma has over 250 stores in India and is also pioneering an ambitious omni-channel model. All the TATA group’s brands are available under the TATA Neu mobile app.
