Homesense to open first store in Southeast at Sawgrass Mills

Home furnishings retailer Homesense will open its first store in the Southeast at the Sawgrass Mills shopping center in Sunrise.

Homesense, owned by the same parent company that owns TJMaxx and Marshalls, will open a 33,710-square-foot store in the northeast corner of Sawgrass Mills.

A spokeswoman for Homesense said the retailer’s store at Sawgrass Mills will open in late 2023. It will open in a section of Sawgrass Mills called Anchor B, where discount apparel and accessories retailer Primark opened a store in 2020. In 2019, the Sunrise City Commission approved an amendment to the original 1989 site plan for Sawgrass Mills, allowing the mall’s owner, Simon Properties Group, to redevelop the Anchor B building.

“Anchor B was formerly occupied by a single tenant and was subdivided following approval of a site plan for the Primark store,” according to a city staff report. “Primark currently occupies the northeast section of Anchor B … Primark [plans] to occupy the remaining southwest portion of Anchor B.”

Homesense will be leasing the space from Simon. No details are available on the terms of the lease.

Last month, Sunrise commissioners approved an amendment to the Anchor B building site plan allowing construction of a Homesense store, with its own exterior entry doors, next to the Primark store. The amended plan includes a “portal” façade element around the entry to Homesense that is architecturally compatible with the Primark store’s entry.

Homesense has 40 stores in the United States, half of them in New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts, and none south of Virginia, according to its website.

Homesense is a discounter that often buys merchandise from distressed sellers, such as manufacturers that overproduce goods and overstocked vendors seeking close-out deals to sell inventory in bulk, its website states. Homesense stores have no walls between merchandise departments, so the retailer can easily expand and contract departments to respond to changes in market conditions.

Homesense, TJMaxx, Marshalls and other retail chains are owned by publicly held TJX Companies, which is headquartered in Framingham, Massachusetts.

TJX reported that the net sales of its household goods business segment, including Homesense, declined 8 percent to $3.9 billion during the six months ended July 30, down from $4.2 billion in the same period last year.

The parent company also said its profit margin on household product sales sagged to 4.4 percent during the six-month period ended in July, from 10.3 percent in the same period last year, due to factors including higher employee wages.