Southport Shop Fitout: Pet Mince Direct

Shaping a Blank Tenancy Into a Sixth Store for a Gold Coast Retail Pet Food Brand

There's a moment in every fit-out where you stand in the tenancy and properly take in what you've said yes to. For the team at Pet Mince Direct, that moment was a slab, four walls, and a whole lot of Southport air. A proper bare shell, with nothing inside but the space and the possibility.

Which was sort of the point. Raw is how Pet Mince like their tenancies, and they'd been keen on the Gold Coast for a while. When this tenancy came up at Queen Street Village, they didn't muck around. Big enough for a proper cold room, room for a freezer, plenty of breathing room for stock. The owner looked around and saw an opportunity to go just that little bit bigger this time, and signed it up.

The brief: a Southport shop fitout that turned a bare tenancy into a working store

By the time Southport came up, the team at Pet Mince Direct already had five stores ticking along nicely across the south-east, so this wasn't anyone's first rodeo. It was, though, their first crack at the Gold Coast, and Queen Street Village was the kind of pocket you'd happily put a store in. Central Southport, easy parking, cinema down the way, IGA anchoring the strip, foot traffic that wasn't going to dry up on you.

Trouble was, it was bare, with four walls, a slab, and a whole lot of imagining to do before it'd start looking like a shop. The kind of project where the blank canvas is either the best news or the worst, depending on the day. And as it turned out, blank was exactly what made this one sing.

The shop fitout solution

First thing you do in a bare shell is work out where the big gear is going. The cold room and the freezer were the heavyweights on this one, the bits that decide everything else around them, so they got the first say on the layout. Once they were locked in, the back-of-house quietly fell into place, and the customer side of the store unfolded around the lot of it with a clean run from the front door through to the counter.
Polished concrete ran throughout, the kind of floor that wears in rather than out and looks the goods for a retail pet food brand. Black overhead, black shopfront, clean lines running through the middle.

• New plasterboard walls sheeted and set right up to the roof, with a small L-shaped return
• Black aluminium shopfront with an integrated floor drain
• Existing ceiling and pipe works painted out in black so the overhead reads clean
• Custom shop counter from the FFO joinery range in the client's colours
• Power, data and black track lighting laid out around the new floor plan
• Plumbing for the stainless prep bench and cold water through to the back-of-house

Why a bare tenancy made for a better Gold Coast store fitout

Walk into most retail refurbishments, and there's already a story written on the walls. The last tenant's plumbing sits in the wrong spot, services snake off in directions you'd rather they didn't, and walls have been put up to solve somebody else's problem ten years ago. Half the job is unpicking the previous chapter before you can start writing yours.

This one didn't come with any of that. The team had picked the tenancy precisely because it was clean, and that little decision earned its keep about ten times over once we got going. The cold room dropped in where stock flow wanted it, the freezer slotted in next door without any fuss, and the shopfront landed where the customer entry made sense rather than where someone else had carved a hole. The counter sat smack in the line of sight as you walk in, the way a good counter should.

It's the bit nobody photographs, but everyone feels the day the store opens. The floor reads naturally, staff aren't walking around things that shouldn't be there, and stock doesn't pile up in spots that can't carry it. A bare shell costs you a little more on the way in, the walls and the services and the finishes you'd have inherited otherwise, but on store number six, when you know exactly how the place is meant to trade, that's a win every day of the week.

The result: a Southport store fitout that looks every bit a Gold Coast retail flagship

The fitout took around four to five weeks on site, all up, with a couple of small holds along the way while suppliers did their bit.

"It's come up a treat"

That's how the team at Pet Mince Direct summed up the location, and they weren't wrong. Central Southport, a stone's throw from a vet, walking distance to the cinema and the IGA, with parking that doesn't punish anyone showing up with a dog in the car.

That's the bit we like hearing.

Thinking about a shop fitout on the Gold Coast or in Brisbane?

Fast Fitouts does retail fitouts, store refits, and refurbishments right across Brisbane, the Gold Coast, and the rest of the south-east. Anything from a small refit in a tenancy that's already got bones, through to a full bare-shell build for a brand opening its sixth store. If you've spotted a Gold Coast tenancy you're shaping from scratch, or your existing place is due for a refresh, give us a yell.

QBCC 1214722. Phone 1300 30 38 31. Email [email protected].
 

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