RCM26Day 1 · 5 October 2026 · Fireside
Right in the Heart: Reinventing a Legacy Mall for Modern Retail
Three takeaways
- 01Mary Del Dosso said BurJuman's repositioning started with market research and four pillars: positioning, customer experience including digital, tenant mix and the physical space, which meant re-anchoring, removing staircases and connecting to Mankhool, with a metro link next.
- 02Despite redeveloping while open, BurJuman grew footfall by over 48 per cent, sales by over 68 per cent and revenue by 81 per cent; Del Dosso said the same works in Australia would have cost 30 per cent of footfall.
- 03Test demand before you invest: BurJuman ran food festivals to learn which flavours customers wanted before designing its food pavilion, and its peak period now starts at 1pm instead of 5pm or 6pm.
About the session
Every established district has a mall that helped define it, and as the city grows outward its owner has to decide what that mall is for now. Mary Del Dosso, Mall Director at Al Ghurair Group, discusses in a one-on-one interview the repositioning of BurJuman, one of Dubai's landmark shopping centres: the tenant mix, food, community and brand decisions behind it, and what changing a place the city knows well involves in practice.
“taking the risk and being brave to make some of those hard decisions of what you're going to keep, what you're going to remove”
From the room
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