It’s a Saturday afternoon in early March, and Bobby Mozumder is striding through his 4,500-square-foot store at Westfield Montgomery mall in Bethesda, snapping photos of the glittery saris and lehengas he plans to showcase on Instagram and Facebook and in online ads.
Though much of the mall is bustling, Mozumder’s Indian and Pakistani clothing shop, Mela—located on the lower level next to the long-shuttered Sears department store—is empty, except for one salesclerk with him. Across from his shop, longtime stalwart Forever 21 is closing for good. Large signs plaster its windows: “Everything must go.”
Few shoppers find their way to this end of the mall, other than a handful of harried parents and nannies who sit on plastic benches along the perimeter of Westfield’s PlaySpace in the hall just outside Mozumder’s store. They alternately check their phones and watch their young charges climb on sturdy play equipment painted to look like smiling cartoon animals.
When it opened in April 2023, Mela was situated across from Urban Outfitters on the lower level of the mall’s Nordstrom wing. Six months later, a tenant with deeper pockets wanted the space. “We’re on a temporary lease [so] in exchange for reduced rent, they can move us around,” says Mozumder, who lives in Germantown.
Mostly, he’s just grateful to be here. Before opening at Westfield Montgomery, Mela was at Lakeforest Mall in Gaithersburg, where “a lot of the indie … stores were crappy,” he says. When that mall closed in 2023, Mozumder was thrilled that management at the more upscale Westfield Montgomery accepted his application to relocate here.
Still, Mozumder looks forward to the day when something replaces the Sears store—which has been closed for six years. The billboard that covers what used to be the department store’s gaping entranceway announces: “We’re Reimagining the Future.” But it’s been up for so long that Mozumder has started to wonder if it’s true. “Nobody wants to be without an anchor right next to it,” he says.
Since opening its doors in 1968, Westfield Montgomery mall has seemingly survived it all: a changeover of most of its anchor tenants, the online shopping phenomenon, a worldwide pandemic that decimated malls across the U.S., and the whiplash of vacillating between promises of transformation into a retail and residential megacomplex and threats of divestiture.
As recently as six years ago, the mall’s owner, Paris-based Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield (URW), hoped to expand Westfield Montgomery into what it then called “a lifestyle destination” complete with several residential components and a “woonerf”—a European-style pedestrian-friendly street lined on both sides with cafes, high-end dining and entertainment, and a smattering of retail. The four-phase preliminary plan the company submitted to the Montgomery County Planning Board in 2018 also included a fitness center, a hotel and a large-scale expansion of the mall’s existing footprint.
But the proposal got waylaid by a housing moratorium the county put in place for the Walter Johnson High School cluster. By mid-2020, when the county lifted the ban and approved the plan, the pandemic was underway and the company was reconsidering its options.
Less than two years later, URW announced it would “radically reduce its financial exposure in the U.S.,” according to a company spokesperson, and it began selling its U.S. mall properties. After off-loading more than half of them, it reversed course and said it would keep its 11 “flagship” malls—including Westfield Montgomery—according to news reports.
Its immediate plans for the mall shifted, however, from expansion toward shoring up its post-pandemic tenant base and reaffirming itself as one of the county’s top draws.
Behind the scenes, says Jason Dyer, the mall’s senior general manager, URW is getting the mall poised for eventual growth. “It’s not like we’re on a standstill by any means. We’re still moving, and we’re moving the pieces of the puzzle to get us where we need to be.”
Perched for nearly 60 years off Interstate 270, just outside the Capital Beltway, Westfield Montgomery is now one of only two major indoor shopping malls still operating in the county. The other, Westfield Wheaton, has moved toward more of a big-box format; three of its five anchors are now Costco, Target and Dick’s Sporting Goods. Like Westfield Montgomery, the Wheaton mall survived URW’s divestitures and is still owned by the company.
The two malls “have just gone in two different directions,” says Stephen Fluhr, senior vice president of development at URW, which has owned both malls since 2018, when French real estate company Unibail-Rodamco acquired Westfield Corp., the Australia-based company that had owned both malls since the 1990s.
The county’s other longstanding malls are gone. White Flint in North Bethesda—once anchored by upscale department stores Bloomingdale’s, I. Magnin and Lord & Taylor—shuttered in 2015 after a nearly 40-year run. Eight years later, Lakeforest Mall in Gaithersburg, a hub for families in the county’s outer suburbs of Gaithersburg, Germantown and Damascus, closed after 45 years in operation.
Even Mazza Gallerie in D.C.’s Friendship Heights, which played host to luxury retailer Neiman Marcus for more than 40 years, closed in 2022 and is being transformed into luxury apartments.
Now, the county’s push for more housing has become URW’s priority, too, at least once it is “economically viable,” according to testimony presented on behalf of URW at a county council hearing in March.
“We have heard the need from Montgomery County for more residential units and have adjusted our plans accordingly,” Fluhr said in an email.
Though the details are still being tweaked, the first two phases of URW’s new plan for Westfield Montgomery include building more than 800 residential housing units—nearly 100 more than its 2018 proposal envisioned in its first two phases, according to a company spokesperson. Of these, 127 are expected to be moderately priced dwelling units, also known as MPDUs. Most of the new housing would connect to the mall via a “main street”-style outdoor thoroughfare offering retail, restaurants and entertainment, the spokesperson says.
According to Fluhr, some of the mall’s existing retail space would be redesigned to face outward to serve as the other side of the new main street-style corridor. The existing Sears store, its former auto repair center and its parking lot would be demolished to make way for the construction.
As for adding retail space inside the mall, URW’s new vision scales that back considerably. “When we looked at our [2018] plans, they were a little too big,” Fluhr says. “From a retail perspective, generally speaking, we have more than enough [space] to reinvent kind of forever. … Our [previous] plan added 120,000 square feet of new retail to the site. … So what we did is we stepped back and [said] let’s take another pass at the plan.”
URW will also need to partner with a residential developer, Fluhr says, and selecting one could take the better part of a year. “We’re retail developers. We were great master planners with the site. We definitely control the vision,” he says, “but we want to partner with a multifamily developer that knows their thing.”
In the meantime, URW is preparing to expand two of its other U.S. malls: Westfield Garden State Plaza in Paramus, New Jersey, and Westfield Old Orchard mall in Skokie, Illinois. Both will soon see the addition of housing complexes, outdoor spaces and more retail and dining. Neither project has broken ground yet, but both are slated to begin this year or early in 2026, says Fluhr, who is based in New Jersey. “These are going to be great examples to start looking at” for what will eventually be proposed for Westfield Montgomery, he says.
County Councilmember Andrew Friedson (D-Dist. 1), whose district includes Westfield Montgomery, says he’s prepared to give URW the time and flexibility it needs to move at its own pace. The company, he says, “forward funded multimillion dollars of … improvements for the transit hub that is there, [it has] made major investments, and my hope is that [it] will continue to make major investments, because the whole community is relying on Westfield Montgomery being successful.”
On the same afternoon that Bobby Mozumder is taking photos in his shop at Westfield Montgomery, Brookeville resident Tarra Foggie is sitting on a sleek silver chaise at the Anya by Vivien dress boutique in the mall’s Nordstrom wing, watching as her 17-year-old daughter, Kendall, tries on prom gowns.
The whole family has come to Westfield Montgomery this day, including Foggie’s husband, Kirk, and their 15-year-old son, Tristan, who sits next to his mother and is playing games on his phone. It was Kirk who read about Anya by Vivien and thought it was worth checking out. The shop was founded by Nigerian-born Vivien Agbakoba, who lives in Potomac and is best known for creating custom gowns for one of reality television’s Real Housewives of Potomac stars.
Anya by Vivien has been in the mall since 2021 and is now in its second home. It’s one of many Black-owned local businesses that have opened in the mall over the past few years. The store’s first location was smaller—too small for Agbakoba to realize her dream of creating a “mini fashion academy,” as she calls it, for economically disadvantaged young people with an interest in dressmaking, fashion merchandising or modeling.
“I thought it would be nice to have them be trained here so they can see the whole process,” she says.
In 2023, she moved to a larger space, remodeled it and added classrooms by the dressing rooms, but has yet to open her academy. Though business skyrocketed for a while after the pandemic—when people resumed planning big events that had been put on hold—it has slowed again, and orders for $5,000 custom-made gowns have declined.
“It went back to what you would call normal traffic,” she says, and now, “I’m seeing with the new government, people are afraid of their jobs … and they’re being extremely intentional and cautious in purchasing.”
Foggie is concerned about the economy, too, but she still wants to support local businesses, she says. A shopping bag by her son’s feet adds credence to her words. It’s from Embrace Ur Greatness, a streetwear store that opened in the mall in November, the brainchild of 33-year-old Vinnie Lucas, who grew up in Potomac’s historically Black townhouse community of Scotland and graduated from Bethesda’s Walt Whitman High School in 2010.
His custom-designed line of streetwear has been a hit since his store opened, Lucas says, and now he’s thinking of signing a longer lease when his current 12-month agreement expires. A sweatsuit he designed for his Black Friday sale sold out within six weeks, and he’d ordered 250 of them.
Lucas doesn’t attach price tags to his items, so interested shoppers have to ask. It gives him the flexibility to reduce the price if an offering is just beyond someone’s means, he says. “I don’t want anybody to come in, see the price and walk out.”
Dyer, who has spent the past six years helping shore up Westfield properties in California, says he’s striving for at least an 80/20 balance at the mall, meaning that at least 80% of its retail space is occupied by national or international brands with long-term leases of between seven and 20 years, and 20% or less is occupied by locally owned shops with leases of three years or less. “That percentage may fluctuate back and forth,” he says, “just to make sure that, you know, we’re still providing our community with what they want.”
URW says it doesn’t report on occupancy data on a shopping center-by-shopping center basis, but according to Morningstar Credit, the mall’s occupancy in 2023 was up more than 20% from 2022, but its net cash flow was 10% lower. Industry experts say that a higher percentage of short-term or temporary leases could be among the culprits.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing, Fluhr says. “Short-term leases give [URW] more flexibility,” he says. “We want to be able to control those spaces as we move into development mode.”
Plus, he says, “We … want to make sure that we include our community partners in here. … [One of them] could be the new up-and-coming retailer in the future.”
According to Fluhr, the biggest challenge the mall faces right now is attracting more “omnichannel” retailers, those who have a seamless online, mobile and brick-and-mortar presence. “We’ve been … positioning ourselves strategically to ensure that we’ve got the … right kind of space to attract those retailers,” he says.
In today’s complex retail climate, the most successful national chains want to keep some physical stores operating, but only their best performers, Fluhr says. For some notable tenants, Westfield Montgomery hasn’t met that criteria.
Among them: luxury fashion brand Michael Kors, which closed its store at the mall in 2022 as it culled about 15% of its 800-plus global locations; and bohemian-chic fashion chain Free People, which opened a small boutique in the mall in 2013 and closed it in 2024 after announcing only a handful of such closings for the year. Both retailers still have locations at Tysons Corner Center in Virginia.
On the other hand, several national retailers have signed new leases over the past year, including 40-year-old Barcelona, Spain-based fashion chain Mango—which opened at Westfield Montgomery in April 2024.
“We say that our shopper is the Bethesda mom and her daughter,” says Mango store manager Kirby Markivich. A solid base of her store’s customers, she says, are those who see their offerings via celebrity sightings on Instagram or TikTok and come in to try them on. Among the brand’s recent viral trends: its cropped faux fur “Beethoven” jacket, which was seen being worn by several European celebrities.
Other recent arrivals at the mall: luxury women’s brand Tory Burch; more casual-leaning Abercrombie & Fitch (which closed a store at the mall in 2021); and children’s clothing retailer Carter’s, which pledged in 2023 to open 250 new stores across the U.S. by 2027.
Among this summer’s arrivals is Japanese clothing and accessory store Uniqlo. It’s expected to open in the space long occupied by fashion retailer Express, which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and closed in 2024. URW says at least 10 additional tenants for Westfield Montgomery will be announced soon.
Uniqlo—which focuses on diversity in its hiring and sustainability in its clothing—may be good for the mall’s business beyond filling an empty storefront: A 2024 survey by Deloitte Global found that more than 60% of millennials (born between 1981 and 1996) and Gen Zers (born between 1997 and 2012) say they want more sustainable goods and are willing to pay more for them.
“My focus is really working on the customer journey,” Dyer says. “I’ve actually … stopped individuals [in the mall] just to ask them: What are you feeling? What are you missing?”
Dyer is part of a new management team brought in this past fall to help move Westfield Montgomery in a positive direction. Among the team’s changes: The background music is now a more tailored mix of ’90s, 2000s and 2020s pop, Dyer says—and management is using social media to better promote the mall’s community and holiday events.
The mall also has hired a new public relations firm that’s been diligently publicizing the mall’s new retailers, food outlets and entertainment venues. “In the past, we have used a couple different PR agencies. I don’t think to the scale that we have right now,” says Catherine Brady, Westfield Montgomery’s new marketing director.
The changes have already had an impact, according to URW. A company spokesperson says sales during the 2024 holiday season were up 11% over 2023.
Pamela Sofola, owner of international clothing boutique A Beautiful Closet, on the lower level of the Nordstrom wing, says she has noticed the improvements the new management has put in place, yet she’s skeptical of whether the mall can return to its pre-pandemic glory.
The Potomac-based certified public accountant opened her shop about six months ago, bringing in unique clothing she discovers on her world travels and a few pieces she designs herself. She used to have a shop upstairs with similar offerings, but that closed mid-pandemic. “I think they’re trying their best,” she says of mall management, “to attract, you know, customers to come back.”
Still, as she looks around at all the baby strollers and teenagers and speed walkers who have returned to the mall in greater abundance than she’s seen in recent years, she laments, “How many people do you see with shopping bags?”
Amy Halpern has worked in print and television news and as the associate producer of an Emmy Award-winning documentary. She lives in Potomac.
This appears in the May/June 2025 issue of Bethesda Magazine.
