The Hidden Constraint on Retail Expansion

A store’s format defines more than its size. It also determines how far a brand can expand.

Xavier Briseño founded Neve Gelato, a brand that primarily operates in mini and food court formats. Photo: SiiLA.

By: SiiLA News

07/09/2026

In Mexico, not every retail chain occupies every type of retail space. Some replicate a single store format every time they expand. Others adapt their stores to the space available. That difference helps explain where brands can—and cannot—grow.

Within shopping malls, retail space is organized into eight basic formats that combine size, location, and function. These range from kiosks and mini stores to mega stores and anchor stores, including small, medium, large, and food court spaces. For a brand, operating more than one format means adapting the same retail concept to spaces with different characteristics. That flexibility allows companies to occupy spaces that would otherwise remain beyond their reach.

SiiLA’s data¹ show that across malls in Mexico City, Guadalajara, and Monterrey, three out of four companies operate a single-store format, while only one out of four uses more than one.

However, even among companies operating multiple formats, diversification remains limited. In most cases, they combine only two store formats, while fewer than 1% operate across five or six formats, the highest level observed in the analysis.

Format diversification remains a minority strategy among brands.

That diversification also follows a pattern. The most common combinations occur between similar formats, such as kiosks and mini stores or small and medium stores. By contrast, combinations between the smallest retail spaces and anchor stores are uncommon.

This pattern suggests that companies do not add new formats to replace existing ones, but rather to progressively expand the reach of the same business.

The cases of Neve Gelato and Liverpool show that multi-format strategies can serve very different purposes. While Neve Gelato primarily operates compact formats such as mini stores and food court spaces, Liverpool concentrates most of its presence in anchor stores while maintaining a limited presence in smaller formats.

That flexibility, however, is rarely concentrated within a single shopping mall. According to SiiLA, only one out of three multi-format companies combines different formats within the same property. In the remaining cases, each shopping mall contains only one format for a given brand.

In that sense, a multi-format strategy expands the range of projects available to a brand rather than the number of spaces it occupies within a single property. For developers, this means the same tenant can satisfy different leasing needs without changing operators.

To learn more about shopping malls and commercial real estate, visit SiiLA Market Analytics or contact us at contacto@siila.com.mx.

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¹ The analysis was conducted using SiiLA’s shopping mall database. Indicators were calculated at the company level based on each brand’s presence across commercial formats. Data were cleaned and standardized, and descriptive analyses were performed to characterize the distribution of commercial formats across companies. The results reflect the structure observed in the analyzed sample.

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