If Chris Kershaw didn’t know the scale of the Eastgate Shopping Centre manager’s job when he accepted the role, he certainly does now.
The new boss at the north’s flagship shopping centre was under no illusions about how important it is to the people of Inverness.
After more than a decade of working in retail in the Highland capital, he knows the lay of the land.
But even he was taken aback by the strength of feeling from people when he was first able to tell them he would be the new person in charge.
“That is something I’ve taken away from the last few months,” Chris said. “Whenever I told anyone about the job, it was ‘where are these guys? Why aren’t you doing this? How are you going to manage this?’
“It’s a big deal in Inverness.”
The new manager’s background
Before joining the Eastgate earlier this year, Chris had a long spell working with Primark.
He joined the fashion retailer while he was still at university and moved up to Inverness to be a trainee manager in 2006 after he graduated.
The 39-year-old is originally from Rochdale, near Manchester. He initially stayed in Inverness for five years before leaving to work as an assistant manager in Aberdeen in 2011.
Four years later, he returned to the Highland capital as Primark’s store manager.
The retirement of long-serving Eastgate manager Jackie Cuddy opened up the opportunity for a new challenge and Chris jumped at it.
Jackie retires after 18 years in the job on Friday.
Although not a native of Inverness, Chris does have the expertise of his Invernessian wife Iona to fall back on.
She has fond childhood memories of the centre’s famous Noah’s Ark clock.
And their daughter, four-year-old Remi, is already following in those footsteps and is a big fan.
Chris said: “What jumped out to me as soon as I came here in 2006 was that the Eastgate was a meeting place, a focal point.
“It’s the centre of town. And even things like the clock, my wife’s told me about how it impacted her as a child, it’s an iconic thing.”
The new food court is expected to open in mid-February.
Once it does, it will inject some much needed life into a part of the centre that has looked lost since the pandemic.
What happens next?
The food court improvements will be a welcome boost in the early days of Chris’s reign.
The empty space left by Debenhams will also be one area that features high on his to-do list.
There have been offers from businesses in the recent past to occupy the ground-floor space, but the right parts haven’t fallen into place quite yet.
As city centres struggle to adjust to a post-retail dominated world, it’s far from a given that a new shop is what will ultimately end up there.
Leisure, food and experience are all key factors in what people are now looking for, instead of the usual shopping centre look.
Chris said: “Leisure has been the driving force behind new shopping centres that have been built recently.
“Places that are not just centred around retail or offices, it has a mix of things.
“The landscape of it purely being a shopping centre, that has changed. You need experience-based reasons to come into the centre now too, as well as the retail.”
Undoubtedly, it’s a tough reality in most sectors at the moment. And retail is one that has been suffering for a while.
But Chris is optimistic about the direction of travel with the Eastgate.
He added: “For me, being store manager at Primark is about as secure a job you can get in retail.
“I wouldn’t have moved here with confidence if I didn’t have optimism about what is ahead.”
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