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Owner walks away from Orange pastry and gelato shop after hotel no-show
April 24, 2024
By Peter Holmes
Eighteen months after launching the premium bakery and gelato shop Billyliks in The Village on Summer Street, owner Matt Chimenti has pulled the plug.
The bakery sold an array of sweet and savoury treats, including focaccia, donuts, gelato, pies and rich, creamy pastries.
Chimenti said one of the main reasons he opened the shop in October 2022 was because of a proposed $25 million four-star "international hotel" and shops on Summer Street at the front of the shopping centre.
There was talk early on about an outdoor cinema and pool, but as with other hotel development applications approved in recent years, for all the song and dance, nothing has happened at the site.
“I’ve been in Orange for 12 years and to me [The Village on Summer] was always a bit of the ugly duckling, but the hotel development would’ve seen a dramatic change in the number of people visiting the centre,” he said.
Chimenti said that when he took the lease “I thought it was a good site, fairly low risk, but they pull the plug on the hotel, I pull the plug on my plans”.
Aside from the lack of progress on the hotel and retail shops, Chimenti said the foot traffic at the shopping centre was not what he had hoped it would be.
“For any kind of business marketing is a big thing, but the cheapest customer acquisition is the customer who walks past your shop,” he said.
Finding staff was also an ongoing issue, as were steep increases in the wholesale cost of ingredients and containers.
One empty premises in the shopping centre is believed to have been rented to Pellegrini's Italian Restaurant as a storage room.
The anchor tenants at the centre are IGA supermarket and Dan Murphy’s booze emporium. The centre earns about 75 percent of its income from those two tenants.
It's apparent to anyone who spends time at the shopping centre that many people buy liquor at Dan Murphy’s, which is positioned outside the centre on the western edge of the site, and then leave without heading into the centre.
Chimenti has spent about 20 years of his working life as a small business owner, and has worked in the mines. His next move will be back into a job with a wage.