We hear all too often that the growth of multichannel retailing, as great as it is reported to be, has a detrimental effect on our high streets. Indeed a number of retailers either have closed, or are planning to close, a great number of their outlets because of their reducing profitability. These retailers say that they are placing more emphasis on their online offers, or simply blaming on-line shopping for the demise of their physical stores.

It is great then to see how some retailers are embracing this multichannel world of retail, using their store estates to assist and further promote online shopping by creating a buy-online-collect-in-store offer. Ingenious really, and obvious!

Online sales won’t suffer, in fact their growth will continue, maybe even accelerate. It could be that many people – like myself – who usually put off on-line shopping because they aren’t at home to accept the deliveries, will be encouraged to use the service knowing they can collect in-store at their convenience. The option of buying online reduces the time needed to be spent in a store, so the simple collection option seems much more attractive.

And there are still cross-sell opportunities…

With careful design and planning of the collection points in store, there also lies an opportunity to encourage impulse purchasing and boost the failing in store sales. A win-win scenario so it seems.

C A Design services are in the enviable position of not only having the ability through our Rhubarb Retail interior Design team to create the in store look and feel, but our large and flexible teams of CADS Retail planning experts  can also quickly and efficiently provide all the planning support required to ‘roll out’ a concept such as this.

Contact our retail team on 01493 440444 for more information.

Julie

The long awaited Portas Review from retail guru Mary Portas has been published today. You can find a copy here:

The Portas Review

Written with passion as well as sound business acumen, the report is well presented and easy to follow.

You can find a summary of the key recommendations from the report here:

The Portas Review – Summary of Recommendations

During a recent retail consultancy visit to Dubai, I was looking forward to challenging my preconceptions of retail in the Middle East and finding out for myself what progress looks like. The purpose of the trip was to meet with a major value fashion brand and report back on their in store design, layout and customer journey.

Part of the itinerary was to visit several of the new shopping malls and then take a trip to the Sharjah, one of the neighbouring Emirates, to get a flavour for the high street. The first mall we visited in Dubai was Ibn Battuta, the World’s largest themed shopping mall design that’s named after a medieval traveller who travelled at least 75,000 miles in his quest to visit the lands of every Muslim leader – that’s probably further than my Gran has driven in her lifetime and she has the benefit of a car to assist her, so a themed mall in Dubai can only be a fitting tribute to him. Nonetheless, once you are in from the heat you are transported to a labyrinth of halls representing China, India, Persia, Egypt, Tunisia and Andalusia.

The quality of the shopping mall fit-out is fantastic; the ceilings are painted up as azure blue skies, there’s a serious investment in mood lighting, the walls are clad in a suitable vernacular and the scenes are dressed with palm trees, chandeliers, fountains and mosaics. The Elephant clock in ‘Persia’ is like nothing you’d see in a UK mall and I can only imagine what the costs would have been to erect this 20ft plus piece of visual theatre.

Overall though, I was more surprised to see the dominance of the fashion stores and the regular brands you’d see on any UK high street, such as H&M, New Look and French Connection. Equally amazing and perhaps the real missed opportunity, is that once you pass the threshold from ‘Egypt’ into one of these mega brands, you could be anywhere in the world.

My guess is that it would have been nice to see some investment from the retailers in the drama of the shopping mall design and development, taking the themes in-store to create some real theatre for the customers; what do you think?

More reports from the Middle East coming soon.

Ross