YooBee's new Christchurch home
This Saturday marks the opening of Christchurch’s new temporary city mall, a development project called Re:START. Made from modified storage containers the mall will be located on both the north and south sides of Cashel Street in the spaces occupied by now-demolished buildings. As both Cantabrians and iOS addicts, the part that excites us the most is that Apple reseller YooBee will be among the list of tenants.
Christchurch lost its YooBee store (MagnumMac as it was previously known) in the shakes, and since then YooBee has only fairly recently reopened in shoe-box sized retail space on Blenheim Road, an industrial part of the city. As such, this will mark not just its return to a more consumer-friendly part of the city but in fact its most consumer-friendly location for Christchurch yet, as its previous two locations on Carlyle Street and then Moorhouse Avenue were really destination locations that you would have to purposefully visit — there were certainly no opportunities to try out the new iPad while the missus was trying a skirt on there.
It’s great that YooBee’s parent company Renaissance have seen fit to make an investment in Christchurch’s broken CBD and we hope that they find success and will go on to find a permanent home there in the future so that we can nip along and buy iPhone cases and what-not during our lunch breaks!
Good on ya, YooBee! See you Saturday (and most weekday lunch-breaks after that!).
