An empty middle: The Oviedo Mall’s kiosk conundrum

If you have walked through the Oviedo Mall in 2024, you may have noticed something has changed.

While the storefronts are still operating as usual, shoppers are now greeted by vacancy in the middle of the mall’s long walkways. Most of the kiosks that once lined them are now gone.

The mall ended its pop-up kiosk program at the end of 2023 after about a year in operation, but not without confusion and frustration by business owners.

Angie Lopez ran an arts and crafts kiosk mostly targeted toward children. She created a single pop-up of her business, Angie’s Art, at the mall in November with the hope of doing more in 2024. 

“I paid the $50 rent that they asked for, and then all of a sudden, they let us know that they were stopping that,” she said.

The changes come as the mall is in flux, with plans underway to bring hundreds of apartments to revitalize the property. Mall representatives said the pop-up kiosk program was always meant to be for temporary spaces.   

“They’re always on temporary agreements and, with any lease, with any agreement — I mean, it wasn’t even a real lease, it was through our events department as a pop-up,” said Josh Gunderson, director of Marketing, Events, & Specialty Leasing at Oviedo Mall . “It was always meant to be temporary. And even on their agreement, and even in the conversations when they were first signing, rates are always subject to change. We essentially treated it, for lack of a better term, like a farmer’s market kiosk.”

Those who ran their businesses in the kiosks, however, did not see it that way.

Michele Garofano, whose Sunflower Girl & Co. kiosk operated at the mall from June through the end of the year, said that when she was first testing the program over the weekends — from Thursdays to Sundays — she had to pack up her goods on Sundays after she closed. But when she signed a longer-term lease, things changed.

“A pop-up technically can’t be more than so many days,” Garofano said. “When you have a lease, you have the keys, you stay there, you do not have to take your stuff down.

“When I signed my six-month lease, I became a permanent vendor, so I didn’t have to pack up on the days that I wasn’t there,” she said.

Sudden change for longer-term kiosks

The news of the program change came suddenly, especially for those on longer-term leases.

On Dec. 22, kiosk owners whose leases were due to come up on Dec. 31 were informed by Gunderson via email that their rent would be increasing by hundreds of dollars per month, and they had until the end of their lease terms — just over a week — to decide whether to pay it or vacate their kiosks. 

The average rent for kiosks on six-month terms was $550 per month, while those on month-to-month agreements paid $650, according to multiple kiosk owners. The increase would have put rent for six-month terms at about $800 per month, plus electricity and taxes.

Not one kiosk owner took the deal.

Garofano felt especially blindsided by the email, since she said she had conversations with management at the end of October or beginning of November about that exact issue.

”This was our conversation: ‘The rent may go up, but we’re not really sure on how much it’s going to be just yet, but since you guys are already here, and you guys have been here, we’re not going to increase your rent. It’ll be the newcomers,’” Garofano said. “It was right before we moved [to a different location in the mall] because I had said my concerns about how I couldn’t afford more than what I was paying now because the mall wasn’t busy enough to pay more.”

Oviedo Community News reached out to Oviedo Mall management over email and social media, and left voice messages, asking about the claims of earlier conversations with kiosk owners about not raising their rent, but did not receive a response.

The next time anything definitive about rent was communicated to Garofano was in the Dec. 22 email, she said. 

”I was pretty pissed when I saw that email, and being that it came over on the 22nd as well, two days before Christmas [Eve], I was even more irate because they couldn’t even have come to us?” she said. “We kept asking and kept asking and we kept getting the cold shoulder, or ‘I don’t know’ as an answer, or ‘don’t worry, we’re going to take care of it, we’ll take care of it, it shouldn’t affect you guys.’

”That’s what we kept getting for months. Then when we got that email, I was like, ‘you got to be kidding me,’” she said.

The sentiment was felt by other owners, as well.

“We were all upset in the way that [they] were treated,” said Car-in Whitehawk, who runs House of Hawk, the only kiosk still in operation because of a lease that expires in March.

Some kiosk owners confronted management about the suddenness of the large rent increases.

“I was the one who was like, OK, this is a little absurd, because you’re telling us on a Friday before Christmas,” Karie Herring, who owns Oviedo Olive Oil, which transitioned from kiosk to storefront in January, said. “I was the one who fired the first email, and I was like, this is unacceptable, this is an ultimatum, and I said, ‘If this is how you do business, I don’t wish to carry on.’”

Herring said that following her email, she was approached by a mall consultant telling her that he did not want her to leave and would meet with her about it. She said she was offered an additional two months at her previous rate.

”It was offered to anyone who brought it up in conversation,” Gunderson said. “Everyone’s expiration was happening at different times, so the initial conversations with anyone who’s expiring at the end of the year, as it was, it is one of those things, come and talk to us.”

Will kiosks return before the holiday shopping season?

There were between six and eight kiosks operating at the mall on a regular or semi-regular basis, with one-day or weekend pop-ups coming in on occasion. 

The decision to increase the rent was done with the future of the mall in mind, Gunderson said.

“[We were] allowing businesses the opportunity to come in at a very low price to try out the retail concepts within a brick-and-mortar space without the obligation of a full-blown lease,” he said. “At the end of the year, it was just decided to sunset that program in favor of trying new and different things.”

The new and different things include a consistent image throughout and consistent messaging for the mall, he said.

“For these pop-up businesses, I mean, for lack of a better term, they weren’t completely legitimate, they were operating, again, sort of like they were at a farmer’s market,” Gunderson said. “And we as a business have to look at what’s best for us, and making sure that we are on the up-and-up with the state and the city. And so that we do have businesses operating with proper insurances, proper LLCs and all of that, which is, again, part of the reason why we had to re-evaluate the operation of the program.”

Garofano said she had proper business licenses and paperwork, though Whitehawk said they were not required to have licenses for the city or individual insurance.

Gunderson admits that the timing of the decision was not an ideal look for mall management, but it was not their intent to surprise owners at the end of the year. It just so happened that many of the agreements were ending just after the holiday season.

“Unfortunately, it did look like the big, bad corporate entity was trying to squash the small businesses,” he said. “The reality is, more than 50% of our tenancy is small businesses.

”We appreciate them and love them and what they’ve helped us do to elevate the mall,” he said. “So just, again, unfortunately, the timing with it being around the holidays is what made it seem a lot worse than it actually was.”

In terms of the kiosk program as a whole for Oviedo Mall, it is unclear whether they will reappear before the holiday season, Gunderson said. If and when they do make a return, he said it will be at a more fair-market rate than what they were charging previously, and possibly higher than the number offered to the then still-existing kiosks in December.

While Gunderson said the new vision is “still in the works,” the changes were made at the end of the year to be able to re-allocate resources and have the mall set up for success as new apartments are added to the property.

“As we’re building up the development of the mall, we’re building up the look of the mall and everything, we have to think about our bottom line,” he said. “We’re working on raising [the mall’s reputation] and bringing a quality establishment to this community. … Unfortunately, doing that costs money.”

The money and need for redistribution of resources led the mall to make the difficult decision about the kiosks.

“My job is to fight for every business in here, so I pushed back constantly, and I pushed back hard on this,” Gunderson said. “But I do understand that the amount of time that was taken to focus on something like the pop-up program, if we refocus that energy toward looking at the bigger picture and looking at raising that bar, it frees up the time that is needed to do those things, and to help plus up the other areas of the mall that we need to focus on.”

Some owners pivot from kiosk to storefront

Some of the kiosk owners saw the changes as an opportunity to grow along with the mall.

Herring, who ran the Oviedo Olive Oil kiosk, had been considering a move to a storefront and just needed the right opportunity. When one opened up, it coincided with the change in the pop-up program, and she and another former kiosk owner who moved to a small storefront earlier in the year, Tabitha Crowley of Malarkey Curiosity & Nonsense, teamed up to combine their shops into one 1,500 square-foot store that opened in January.

“It just so happened that we were here long enough as a stepping stone,” Crowley said. “The next step is to get a store, so when this opened up, Karie and I jumped on it.”

The timing worked out, because Herring admits that she may not have continued the kiosk at the increased rate.

“I was going to walk away,” she said. “I was going to say, ‘this doesn’t make sense for me.’”

Kathy Fishbough, who owns Sugar-hi, now in the mall’s food court, also moved from a kiosk to a storefront, and said it was just the natural evolution for her business.

“We just moved up,” she said. “We graduated.” 

Not all kiosk owners were as fortunate as Herring, Crowley and Fishbough, though.

Whitehawk is still waiting to hear about the future of her kiosk, with only weeks remaining on her agreement.

In the meantime, she has secured a spot in Hometown Furniture & Decor Market in Winter Park, where she can continue selling her goods. But that doesn’t take away the sting of how the Oviedo Mall kiosks have been handled.

“I really felt a lot of depression, a lot of sadness, about the turn of events for Oviedo Mall,” Whitehawk said. 

But there is hope that they will return to the median of the Oviedo Mall walkways, just in a different form.

“I don’t think it’s the end of the kiosks,” Herring said. “I think they are looking to coach up the current leasing management so that they understand what they’re looking for within the mall.”

And what is it that they are looking for in the mall?

“I feel like the mall is trying to upgrade itself,” Crowley said. “They are trying to elevate the mall.

“At some point, change has to happen.”