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ORANGE PARK – On one of the most-perfect days in months, hundreds of residents and shoppers decided to spend the day inside at the Orange Park Mall last Saturday, Feb. 27, instead of being outside in the bright sunshine.

While many customers are choosing the ease and safety of shopping online, the Orange Park Mall is enjoying a resurgence of commerce. “Available” signs are being replaced with new neon and posted store hours. While other malls are little more than canyons of failed businesses and a society that’s more in tuned with buying things digitally, shoppers are walking out the doors with filled bellies and bags of goodies.

“When you step into the mall, you see a breath of fresh air of a vibrant community,” said mall general manager Randy Bowman.

In the past month, three new tenants – Ruby Thai Kitchen, kravegan and Taste of Paradise, set up shop in the food court, joining Mr. Potato Spread. All four were greeted with long lines and smiling faces.

While other malls are going under, Orange Park now boasts a 99% occupancy rate, Bowman said.

The mall’s success is homegrown. Orange Park concentrates on being part of the Clay County community.

“We’re pro retail,” Bowman said. “We understand our market. We know we have to cater to the market. We don’t have a cookie-cutter approach. We have tenants who fit in this community.”

While Coresight Research estimates 25% of the country’s malls – about 1,000 of them – will close in the next couple years. Declining in-person sales and restrictions in some states for the COVID-19 pandemic have created a devastating blow to the industry.

Orange Park, however, found a way to thrive during the pandemic.

“We have roughly 140-plus tenants and 87 of them are small business owners than live here, play here and work here in Clay County,” Bowman said. “That says a lot about who we are and how we’ve been able to make it through the pandemic. Clay County is a bedroom community. Being a bedroom community, prior to the pandemic, people would go into Jacksonville to work. Now they’re working from home. Instead of crossing the bridge to go to another center, they’re staying close to home and coming to the mall more often.

“We’re very focused on protecting the assets, protecting our tenants, which I consider them to be partners. I don’t even consider them tenants. We work with their best interests, giving them all the support and tools needed to stay afloat. We’re here to support them and to draw customers to them. We’ve created this nice little partnership and collaboration between our marketing team and to put on about 60 events a year. All the work we have put into the center since we took it over 2½ years ago, as the GM, it is really starting to pay off – and it paid off big time during the pandemic. Building those relationships, we’ve been bringing in tenants that were right for the center and right for the tenants.”

Some of the events include art classes, KIDX Club, Caffeine and Gasoline car shows, holiday displays, Farm and Flea markets, free drive-in movies and a traveling water shows.

“One of the first things we started looking at when we took it over 2½ years ago was how is this going to look five years from now? We had to put the pieces of the puzzle together, really targeting and changing our focus to focusing on the county, focus on what is needed to keep people in the county versus having people go across the bridge to get what they need at a different location,” Bowman said.

“We’ve created this nice little partnership and collaboration between our marketing team and to put on about 60 events a year,” Bowman said. “All the work we have put into the center since we took it over 2½ years ago, as the GM, it is really starting to pay off – and it paid off big time during the pandemic. Building those relationships, we’ve been bringing in tenants that were right for the center – and right for the tenants.”