Having started life on the high street, Giraffe decided a couple of years ago to bring its family-friendly restaurant concept to the shopping centre environment. But instead of replicating its high-street menu, the restaurant chain has enjoyed huge success with a menu designed specifically for fast-paced shopping centre clientele.
Having configured itself as a child-friendly place to eat, Giraffe has successfully tapped into the high percentage of women with young children in shopping centres on weekdays. However, the restaurant is also a popular lunchtime venue for mall staff.
Juliette Joffe, co-founder of Giraffe, says: "We have good contact with other shops and we offer them discounts to eat in Giraffe. If you work in a mall, you very often don't go outside for lunch. For example, The Trafford Centre is huge, so if you work there you don't have time to go outside to eat."
Understanding that, unless they are very tired from shopping, people visiting shopping centres tend to spend less time eating and have a more flexible approach to when they eat, Giraffe took the decision to offer a slightly different menu to mall workers and family shoppers.
"The menu for malls includes a £6.96 lunch offer. Mall shoppers also tend to want sandwiches at 3pm, which we don't provide on the high street," says Joffe. "There are also many different items such as soups and pastries on the mall menus."
The greater focus on shopping in malls leads to a slightly lower average spend in these restaurants compared with those on the high street, and the shorter opening hours at some centres mean people are not always able to 'make a night of it'.
However, as The Trafford Centre restaurant also caters for people visiting the mall's cinema in the evenings, Joffe says its opening hours are very similar to those of the high street outlets - trading until midnight from Monday to Friday and 11pm on Sundays.
To date the company has opened four mall restaurants and five within airports, which are run on a franchised basis by The Restaurant Group, which handles the day-to-day operations. Its airport business includes restaurants at Heathrow T1 and T5, as well as Manchester, and Juice Bars at T5 and Stansted, which serve sandwiches, wraps, juices and smoothies.
Giraffe's first mall unit was in Milton Keynes, opening in November 2006. That was shortly followed by The Trafford Centre in the same month, then Lakeside in June 2007 and Exeter in September 2007.
"The Trafford Centre was the first unit up north so it was good for our profile," says Joffe. "We were there for a year before we opened on Spinningfields Square, which enabled us to get our name out there. People knew about Giraffe as they'd seen us in The Trafford Centre food hall with all the other restaurants."
Joffe finds it just as competitive in the malls as on the high street, with Giraffe competing with many of the same names, including the Wagamama, Strada and Nando's.
The mall environment presents various specific challenges such as the fitting of kitchens. At Exeter, Joffe says it wasn't possible to incorporate the high-temperature hobs necessary to cook noodle dishes, so these are not on the menu at this specific outlet. Marketing activities can also be a challenge with Joffe highlighting the ban on using gas-filled balloons in malls because "they float to the ceiling and can bang like a bomb".
But despite such issues Joffe says the company is on the lookout for more units and plans to build the business from the current 26 restaurants to between 35 and 40 by 2009.
"We're on the expansion train. We are always interested in looking into any areas of the country that come our way," says Joffe, adding that Giraffe now has an in-house specialist assigned to sourcing new property rather than using agents.
To make its mall restaurants work, Giraffe requires high levels of passing trade. Hot weather is always a boost to this as shoppers seek out a cool mall environment. While they're there, they could easily enjoy a tangy and spiced turkey enchilada washed down with a Cruzcampo beer.
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=== Statistics ===
giraffe
Founded: 1998
Founders: Russel and Juliette Joffe
Number of self-operated restaurants: 21
Number of franchised restaurants: 5
Square footage: between 2,500 sq ft and 4,000 sq ft
Website: [http://www.giraffe.net]
