New life for old mill: Downtown's eager for it to happen

By: Dale Gowing | Mooresville Tribune
Published: January 15, 2010

Wow Home Furnishings, which is moving into the long-vacant Burlington Mills building on South Main Street, touts itself as a "destination" store.

Kim Atkins says that theme fits perfectly with downtown Mooresville's mission to drawing customers from miles away to the historic business district.

"Based on (Wow's) size, they're going to have a pretty large advertising reach," said Atkins, executive director of the Mooresville Downtown Commission. "In a downtown situation, you advertise and it helps your neighbor and vice versa.

"This is going to help us continue to create that 'destination' atmosphere."

Wow Home Furnishings bills itself as a retail/wholesale emporium containing a wide variety of domestic and imported furniture, home decor and accessories.

A centerpiece of its stores are Persian-style area rugs manufactured in Turkey. That import business is a focal point of Wow's parent company, Concord Global Trading of New York City, which purchased the Mooresville mill site for $500,000.

Wow Home Furnishings has two other retail locations, in Jefferson, Ga. and Fort Lawn, S.C., about 16 miles south of Rock Hill. Both stores took over vacant textile mills, but neither as big as Mooresville's 755,000-square-foot Burlington facility, which has sat empty on 38 acres since its denim operation was moved to Mexico in 1999.

Michael Bay, a native of Turkey who has managed the Fort Lawn store since it opened in October 2008, will move to Mooresville to manage the facility here. Its target opening date is May.

Bay cautioned against expecting big numbers of consumers coming to town initially.

"It takes time to draw," he said. "It will locally, then expand. We've had great success with that at our other stores; they've become destinations for people from hours away."

Bay said Wow Home Furnishings promotes a European flavor for its stores. "We do a fruit market and fresh cheese market, like typical European markets, " he said.

The draw of old mill sites is a Concord Global Trading hallmark, he said. The Fort Lawn store is in a former Springs Industries plant.

"These buildings are usually so wonderful because of their history," he said. "It's such a shame to see the (Mooresville) building just sitting there. We have incredibly beautiful plans for it; we're going to make sure it keeps its flavor while improving it."

The downtown commission's Atkins said she isn't worried about the location of the mill here, confident that customers will head downtown from the interstate.

"I know (Wow) is in other old mill locations and not right off the highway, so they've seen success with that," she said. "Good signage at the interstate will help everybody."

And bottom line, said Atkins, is that anything's better than a vacant mill surrounded by chain link fencing.

"The fact that there's going to be life in that building will help us all immensely," she said. "And when you come into town from the south, it will look so much better now."

Bay said he doesn't know how many people the Mooresville store will employ, but noted that the Fort Lawn location only has two dozen.

"We don't have sales people," he explained. "You come in, there's no hard sell. We're just there to help if we're needed."