Players from the Bay of Plenty Steamers will be at Bayfair Shopping Centre next week to meet and greet fans, and thank them for their steadfast support season after season.

With their eyes firmly set on the 2010 ITM Cup, the Bay of Plenty Steamers turn their attention to Bayfair Shopping Centre for a signing evening on Thursday 12 August, from 7pm to 8pm. 

This is your chance to get up close and personal with 13 Bay of Plenty Steamers stars, including Captain Colin Burke, Lance MacDonald and Jason Hona. The players will be signing free posters that are available from the Bayfair Shopping Centre Information Desk from Friday 6 August onwards, while stocks last.

Getting out in the community is an important part of the Steamers’ schedule. The team is looking forward to meeting its supporters first-hand and generating interest.

Bay of Plenty Steamers Sales and Marketing Executive Warren Kibur says, “Meet and greets are fantastic. Bayfair Shopping Centre is helping the team give back personally and opportunities like this generate great enthusiasm among players and supporters alike. These occasions are our way of saying thank you.”

Bayfair Shopping Centre Marketing Manager Nina Rivett says, “Bayfair is proud to support the Bay of Plenty Steamers and help bring them closer to our community. It is a pleasure to be associated with the team.”

From Thursday 12 August to Sunday 22 August, Bay of Plenty Steamers fans will be given the chance to win two signed Bay of Plenty Steamers jerseys. Anyone that purchases a snack or meal from participating retailers at Bayfair can enter the draw to win one of the two jerseys.

In addition, if a shopper discovers a rugby ball sticker on a soft drink purchased from the same retailer, he or she has won two tickets to see the Bay of Plenty Steamers vs. Southland game at 2.35pm on Saturday 16 October at Baypark, Mount Maunganui.

ends

The Bayfair Shopping Centre $15 million refurbishment is progressing smoothly, with the artist’s impression provided exclusively to the Bay of Plenty Times this week.

May 13, the Bay of Plenty Times featured the artists impressions in a front page spread ‘Revealed – New Look For Bayfair’ and including a comparative black and white image of Bayfair the way it was in 1985, with only 27 retailers.

The refurbishment is well under way and will be completed in November.  Local shoppers will welcome a new JB Hi-Fi to the area, along with five other new tenancies and a new glass feature in the eastern entrance way. 

Follow the link here for the full Bay of Plenty feature or here to see what happened when Simon Bridges visited Bayfair last month.

Bayfair Shopping Centre’s $15 million refurbishment is well under way with local construction firm Marra Construction’s 30-plus team working on site each day. 

Tauranga MP Simon Bridges was on site at Bayfair Shopping Centre to view the progress of the refurbishment.  Looking forward to seeing the work being done at Bayfair, Mr Bridges donned a hardhat and hi-visi-vest during his visit to the centre where sunlive.co.nz caught a glimpse behind the scenes of development.

Bayfair Shopping Centre Manager Andrew Wadsworth says “it is a tremendous refurbishment and the timing is ideal as we approach Bayfair’s 25^th anniversary. It will add more shops to the retail mix and give the front of the centre a more contemporary look – which will be great for retailers and customers alike.”

It’s not everyday that a national sporting tournament is played out in the centre of a shopping mall. However, shoppers at Bayfair Shopping Centre in Mount Maunganui found themselves centre court during August 2009 when a massive glass court was erected in the mall to host the A1 Homes NZ Women’s Open. Around 18,000 spectators descended on the mall to witness a piece of the fast-paced action.

Having seen examples of the glass courts erected overseas, Bayfair and Bay of Plenty Sport decided it would be a great way to bring the sport to the masses, staging the event in the centre of the mall in full public view – from all corners!

It was also the first time in 13 years a NZ Women’s Open tournament had been played in New Zealand, another great story.

The AC team focused on profiling Bayfair’s innovative approach – a NZ first – hosting the tournament in the centre as well as celebrating this milestone event with the local community and high-profile Tauranga personalities.

Results

What better way to commemorate this event than with the darling of New Zealand squash and one of our most successful international female squash players of all time – Dame Susan Devoy! Dame Susan was invited to play a match against the Bay of Plenty’s rookie MP Simon Bridges – a challenge which she accepted without reservation.

This event captured the attention of the public, attracting around 100 onlookers and media keen to see their local MP take on the sporting legend. Despite a considerable absence from the court and retirement from professional squash, Dame Susan showed Simon a thing or two about the game. Needless to say, Simon was an excellent sport!

The event made national TV, when Breakfast took the opportunity to show coverage of the match on the politician’s regular young gun segment that week. The Breakfast hosts had quite a chuckle, at Simon’s expense, about his technique and bravado in challenging such a sporting great.

The NZ Herald, Bay of Plenty Times, Sunlive and Classic Hits Tauranga also covered the event, relishing the opportunity to see their local MP put himself up for the challenge.

The rather unique setting for the national squash tournament was the focus of a piece on prime-time current affairs show Campbell Live. The article titled ‘Squash open gives new meaning to window shopping,’ looked at the angle of reinvigorating public interest in the sport and the innovative approach of taking it to the people in a glass court in the centre Bayfair. Journalist Emma Keeling described the court as ‘oasis for sport’s lovers in a desert of shopping’

Media Release March 2009

In the worst economic climate in living memory, companies are tightening their belts by cutting costs wherever possible. One shopping centre is leading the charge, and showing that it’s possible to turn a profit while also doing right by the planet.

Over the past six years, Bayfair Shopping Centre has demonstrated that cost savings can be made through wide-ranging sustainability initiatives. The completed redevelopment of the food court is the latest advance in the centre’s recycling programme, which since 2003 has seen waste costs drop by 44%.

The many benefits of the programme include the saving of 48 tonnes of food scraps each year (the weight of 240,000 hamburgers); energy cost savings of more than $200,000 in six years (at today’s energy costs); the sparing of local landfills from unnecessary food and paper waste; the active role taken by staff and retailers in protecting the environment; and the demonstration to the rest of the nation that a large retail centre can have a true triple-bottom-line focus, with financial, social and ecological benefits for the company and the community.

Bayfair’s operational costs are historically low, based on industry benchmarks, and this trend will continue throughout and beyond 2009 following the makeover of the food court, which now sports new furniture and a reconfigured design of partitions and cleaning service stations. “The new food court design was based around choosing sustainable material, reusing as much of the previous material as possible and recycling old materials wherever possible – all to provide full sorting and recycling capabilities for the operation,” Operations Manager Steve Ellingford says.

The redevelopment of the food court has been made possible in part by funding from the Government’s Love NZ – Recycling in Public Places initiative, in partnership with the Tauranga City Council. The Love NZ contribution financed recycling bins at the centre. “In enabling us to capture as much recycled material as possible, this expands what we are already doing on the sustainability front,” Mr Ellingford says. “There are now no general rubbish bins for public use, which means all waste is collected by the centre’s staff and the recycling is fully controlled.”

Further funding from the Love NZ initiative has seen the installation of common-area recycling bins. The initiative allows customers outside the food court to recycle their own paper/cardboard, cans, and glass and plastic bottles.

The centre runs an ongoing sustainable retailer training programme to encourage retailers to help maintain and further the centre’s sustainability practices. Mr Ellingford says retailer buy-in to the programme is extremely important for the centre to maintain and advance its leading sustainability status. “The programme will focus on what the centre is doing, ongoing education about the centre’s sustainable culture, and what the retailers can do to help and what they think would improve our current initiatives.”

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About Bayfair Shopping Centre
More than 90 of the Bay’s best stores are conveniently located under one roof, with seven-day opening and two late nights to accommodate busy lifestyles. Large-format stores include Farmers, K-Mart, Countdown and Woolworths. Bayfair provides a full range of services for customers, including parents’ room, wheelchairs, strollers and kiddy karts. We also have free interior and exterior parking for 1700 vehicles.

Bayfair is committed to the local environment and is a strong supporter of the paper4trees project, which rewards schools in the local area with trees for their recycling efforts.

For further information:

Alexander Communications
Bernadette Barrett
+64 (0)9 522 5544
027 477 1573
bernadette@alexandercomms.co.nz
 Bayfair Shopping Centre
Steve Ellingford
+64 (0)7 928 3443
021 498 999
steve.ellingford@ampcapital.com