Shaheen Sadeghi’s a developer with a knack for envisioning gathering spots that inspire community pride and appear resilient to challenges plaguing bricks-and-mortar retail.
His Lab Holdings LLC in Costa Mesa has worked on 42 projects in and around Orange County, and he’s held on to all of them as owner-operator. Notables include a former goggle factory he turned into The Lab—or “antimall”— in 1992, and The Camp, which followed across Bristol Street in 2002 with a sustainable-themed retail lineup.
Sadeghi also owns a historic, 40,000-square-foot fruit packing house in downtown Anaheim that his team converted into a popular food hall in 2015 featuring 32 independent restaurants. Several iterations of the concept by other developers came on board this year—think Trade in Irvine and McFadden Public Market in Santa Ana—and Square Mixx is scheduled to open at The Source in Buena Park next year.
“I feel as though the world is shifting our way,” said Sadeghi, who was one of five Innovator of the Year honorees at the Business Journal’s annual event on Sept. 12 at Hotel Irvine (see related stories, pages 1, 14, 17 and 18).
“I think many of our communities are not seeing the value of national chains. As a matter of fact, we feel that it sort of undermines the brand of each city, and they’re all looking for unique local things that would be much more neighborhood and community driven.”
Tapping trends before others do can also be a curse; you’re not only trying to change minds and habits but also municipal laws that have yet to adapt to the digital revolution that’s consumed the marketplace over the past decade.
“Our biggest hurdles these days are the overregulation of California—and we’re environmentalists,” Sadeghi said.
Most of the building codes were written in the 1980s or late ’70s, “at a time when there was telex and fax machines as a means of communication, and today our means of communication is an iPhone,” he said. “So we’re [talking to] the iPhone generation, but our building codes are fax machines, and they’re not lining up.”
Case in point: outdated parking codes that don’t take into account the rise in popularity of ride-sharing services. Sadeghi’s team reports that about 5,000 Uber rides either start or end at his properties each month—and that’s just one operator. That’s 5,000 cars that didn’t need parking spots, he pointed out.
He remains optimistic, however.
“The bright spot is I think many of these cities, as the more senior planners are retiring, are now bringing in this next generation of younger planners that are much more aggressive and who really understand this new generation of consumers.”
From Fashion to Facades
Sadeghi grew up in Michigan and moved to New York to study at Pratt Institute’s School of Design, Fashion and Architecture. He remained in Manhattan after graduation, training to become a couturier while working for designer Charles James, who “had this amazing way of thinking about design and forming.”
He moved to California several years later to try his hand at casual apparel, joining Catalina sportswear, then Jantzen, where he stayed for about a decade, working his way from designer to general merchandise manager.
By the mid-1980s he joined Gotcha Sportswear Inc. as executive vice president in charge of product and he helped take the company “from $10- to $15 million to $150 million in about four years.”
He left in 1992 for a short stint as president of Quiksilver Inc. in Huntington Beach, which has been renamed as Boardriders Inc.
“I decided that I wanted to do something else because retail at that time, it was very apparent that things were falling apart,” he said, adding that his international travels helped him realize “that in America we were missing something in retail, and it was very clear that this next generation of customers were not necessarily mall customers.”
When he opened The Lab, he felt “there was nothing in the arena for small businesses to sort of pitch down their tent and sell their goods in a synergetic environment.”
About eight years ago, Sadeghi set up Community Management Corp. to manage his projects. It employs 175 people between offices in Anaheim and Costa Mesa.
Looking Ahead
These days he’s busy with the Agora Arts District in Laguna Niguel, along with projects in Anaheim, Garden Grove, Costa Mesa, San Marcos and Newport Beach.
When asked how he would repurpose the space Sears Holdings Corp. recently sold to the owners of South Coast Plaza, Sadeghi was quick to answer that he “wouldn’t put a department store in there,” but something that creates the opportunity for a social connection.”
“As much as people are on Facebook and other apps, I personally think that we’re seeing a value for face-to-face meeting. We’re less about shopping and spending money on things that we don’t really need and consuming, and more about investing in experiences. Actually, I know exactly what I would do with [the space], but I don’t know if I’m going to put it out there.”
