Jul 20, 2009

Selling downtown: Recruiter focuses on sparking area developmentBy Doris HajewskiJSOnline.com

Armed with enthusiasm and the belief that the recession won’t last forever, Deanna Inniss is aiming to restart retail development downtown, a difficult task even in a good economy.

“I see it can come back again,” said Inniss, in a lunchtime chat at the Milwaukee Public Market. “You need visionaries and you need pioneers to start it.”

Inniss, a New York native, is a retail veteran recently hired by the downtown Business Improvement District No. 21. The district is a public entity that has authority to tax businesses within its boundaries. The money is used to promote business in the area, in this case, by paying Inniss to recruit retailers.

Her project focuses on street retail, and doesn’t include the ailing Shops of Grand Avenue. But Inniss’ effort comes at the same time that the downtown mall is running a free-rent contest to bring in more tenants.

Both Inniss and Erica Anderson, director of marketing and specialty leasing at the Grand Avenue, have the same goal: to attract retailers that would be unique to downtown and would give suburbanites a reason to come downtown to shop.

Inniss was a private label product developer for Kohl’s Corp., in the baby and toddler area, and before that spent eight years in a similar role at Gap Inc. in San Francisco. In 2005, she left Kohl’s to follow her entrepreneurial dream of opening her own store, Freckle Face, an upscale baby boutique in the Third Ward.

She signed on with a downtown business improvement district early this year as a 28-hour-per-week retail recruiter, after a consultant hired by the improvement district recommended that the job be created. Downtown Works, a Washington, D.C., consulting firm, said the district needed someone to beat the drum for retail if it wanted to see a recovery in Milwaukee’s downtown.

The Downtown Works report says the current population of residents and downtown workers can support 1.5 million square feet of retail, and catalogs 1.1 million square feet of existing street front retail. This is in addition to the space in the Shops of Grand Avenue, which is not included in the report.

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