Eight years ago, Tony Elvin was managing Hotel Du Vin in Birmingham when a recruitment consultant called with an unexpected question. Would he consider running a shopping centre? His answer, eventually, was yes. Now General Manager at Touchwood Solihull, a 105-unit scheme anchored by John Lewis and Apple, and drawing visitors from across the Midlands, he has spent nearly a decade proving that hospitality experience and retail management have more in common than most people think.

We spoke to Tony about community, data, sustainability, and what it takes to make a provincial shopping centre punch well above its weight.

Hospitality is fundamentally about delivering an experience, and that transfers directly. Attention to detail, making people feel welcome, building relationships. Our team won’t just tell you where something is, they’ll take you there. There’s a statistic I come back to often: almost half of visits to a shopping centre are now to eat and drink or play, rather than simply shop. So getting that experience right isn’t a nice to have. It’s central to what we do.

We’ve been through a pandemic, an energy crisis, and now hospitality is under significant cost pressure. Through all of that, the role of a centre manager is to be the conduit between owner or asset manager and occupier. Building relationships, understanding what people need, helping them navigate those choppy waters. I hear regularly from occupiers that they’ve never had a management team engage as much as we do. That’s not just down to me. The whole team earns it.

It varies enormously. We recently sat down with all our independent hospitality occupiers alongside the asset management team and put a tailored marketing and PR plan together for each of them.

But it’s not all marketing. We’ve introduced businesses to the local catering college, connected others with Solihull BID or the Chamber of Commerce. For newer brands it might be something very practical. Beleza Rodizio – a Brazilian dining experience – opened in November. They’re destination dining, at the back of the scheme, and this is only their third UK restaurant. So, we shot a TikTok video walking the route from the busiest part of Touchwood straight to their front door. It got thousands of hits. Sometimes the most effective support is the most straightforward.

We use banking data to map where our visitors come from, and there’s a visualisation that shows the Bullring’s sphere of influence spreading across Birmingham. Then there’s a different colour emanating from Touchwood, punching back towards the city and dominating our patch.

When John Lewis invests three and a half million pounds in its store here and Apple expands to nearly four times its previous unit size, it confirms what the data shows. Touchwood has a unique, affluent shopper who wouldn’t necessarily go into Birmingham. Brands understand that.

We have an ageing building management system, but integrating with Workman’s IBOS platform has extended its life and given us accurate, live data on energy use. That visibility has delivered savings of 18% year on year. At a time of rising energy costs, that matters directly to occupiers because those costs come through the service charge. Money saved there gets reinvested in the building, or in marketing.

We’re certified to ISO 50001 and ISO 14001, have a zero-to-landfill position, and recycling rates above 80%. Occupiers need to demonstrate sustainability credentials to their own stakeholders, so this isn’t just the right thing to do. It’s commercially important too.

We also sponsor the Greener Schools Awards locally, because the generation entering the workforce now cares deeply about this, and we want to reflect that.

Community is a key pillar of our strategy at Touchwood. That might be within our local business community or our local community of guests and visitors.

In the first instance, being able to influence outside your own sphere of control is one of the most critical parts of my role. I am chair of the Solihull BID and the Visit Solihull Steering Group. I sit on the Chambers of Commerce executive board, the borough’s Cultural Compact and the Community and Faith Leadership Group, representing the local business community. These roles help me connect with key stakeholders across the borough making decisions that could affect Touchwood and our tenants. These groups give me regular access to Councillors, MPs, local educational institutes, community leaders, tourism venues and high-ranking members of West Midlands and Solihull Policing. Collectively Touchwood and our tenants represent 24% of the Solihull BID levy, so it’s important that I have a seat at that table and others so that I can advocate for our businesses and the wider town.

Thinking about our local community of guests and visitors, the reason we are all here, our community work helps shape a significant part our marketing approach. As our local population has evolved, so have we. We celebrate Eid, Diwali, Holi, Vaisakhi, and Lunar New Year, alongside Christmas and Easter, working with community groups to give them a platform to celebrate what’s important to them. Last year we held our first Touchwood Mela, and the town’s first Pride celebration. A customer came up to me at our Diwali event and said he’d lived in Solihull for 40 years, that Diwali had always been celebrated in small community halls, and he couldn’t believe he was seeing it like this at Touchwood. That makes everything feel worthwhile.

Someone who cares, has great energy, and is a great communicator. The role surprises people with how varied it is. No two hours are the same, let alone two days. If you thrive on variety, pace, and genuine connection with people, it’s a fantastic career.