The city of Detroit is creating a senior director of retail attraction.
The goal is bringing more regional and national brands to Detroit. The examples on Woodward Avenue downtown that Davis cited are Warby Parker, Lululemon, and H&M. Those three stores represent the kind of national presence the new position is meant to expand.
Creating a dedicated role for retail recruitment is a specific kind of bet. Most economic development work at the city level runs through multipurpose offices that handle site selection, small business support, and a range of other functions. A dedicated retail attraction hire means someone whose full-time job is making the case to national brands that Detroit is worth their square footage.
That case involves overcoming a lag. National retailers make location decisions on market studies and foot traffic data, and those studies tend to update slowly. Detroit's retail environment on Woodward has added names over the past decade. The foot traffic around the arena district and the investment coming into Corktown have changed the calculus, but those changes may not yet be registering in the market analyses that corporate real estate teams in other cities use when they build expansion lists. A dedicated senior director would work to close that gap.
Warby Parker, Lululemon, and H&M are mid-tier national chains with a pattern of choosing dense downtown corridors. Their presence on Woodward is the baseline the city is apparently trying to build from. The new role's job is more of the same.
