Imagine a store that was unable to stipulate what it sold because the type of merchandise changed every month! If you think that’s too bizarre a concept, think again and be prepared to change your view of ‘Concept Retail’.
According to the findings in the recent PwC report Retailing 2015, the retail industry is becoming more complex and changing at an ever-increasing speed, due to shifting demographics, more educated consumers and e-commerce, amongst other trends.
Shopping is also becoming more experiential; eating, being entertained and ‘living’ the shopping experience are taking prominence. This new wave of thinking about retail has given rise to a surge in brands experimenting with concept stores.
Apple and Burberry have been leading the pack when it comes to creating experience-focused retail for many years, but a wider range of brands is starting to experiment with concepts, and no longer just luxury brands, either.
Independent Retail Concepts
Upmarket US retailer, J.Crew, opened its first menswear-only boutique in the former Liquor Store Bar. Liquor Store’s concept breaks away from the standard mall-like J.Crew setup with dark panelling and antique displays, plush leather chairs, and art-directed knickknacks strewn about. The den’s dim lighting, oriental rugs, and bookshelf stacked with masculine Strand-issued classics – Kerouac, Hemingway, and Cheever among them – lure nearby office workers on lunch break. The apparel here is displayed elegantly, almost unobtrusively, among the made-to-look-original decor.
They left the old liquor-store facade of the building intact, right down to the neon sign. It feels like a derelict building in its non-name brand, non-retail area several blocks away from the trendy Soho. And that’s actually kind of cool. From clothes piled everywhere, to randomly placed paperweights and books scattered among scarves and other stuff, this place feels like a secondhand store, but with J. Crew merchandise and a few other brands as well. What makes the whole thing work is that there still is a bar inside, replete with liquor bottles and other assorted bar paraphernalia. However, there is no question where you are.
The thing is, the concept feels so authentic that you would never know it was created by one of the most respected retailers today.
However, there’s a reason that big retailers don’t want to seem so big. With all the uproar about going local, from food to retail, big retailers want to seem like they fit in better. That’s why big-box retailers in the US, like Best Buy and Staples, are building smaller versions of their concepts so they can open more locations. But more importantly, retailers like J.Crew are trying to appear more independent, because that’s what people want.
‘Destination store’
Similarly to J.Crew, the Canadian high-end clothing brand Club Monaco fills its flagship and pop-up concept shops with a well-thought out environment, with lush, lifestyle-focused interiors. However, this is not just a clothing store. Their flagship store on New York’s Fifth Avenue features not only the full breadth of Club’s collections, but also has a coffee shop, flower shop and a Strand book store, lending new meaning to the phrase ‘destination store’. The store, which never seems to end, is not merely a retail space, but also acts as a physical representation of Club’s complete vision.
Created by the detail-driven visionary, Senior VP of Global Store Experience, James Mills, each store tells a thoroughly considered story, just like a beautiful home would. Offer the cosiness of a library, a cup of coffee or an Art Deco fireplace in a ladies’ lounge as a gateway to a shopping spree.
“We wanted to create a space where you don’t just come to buy a sweater, but you are getting an education on art and culture,” said Allison Greenberg, Club Monaco’s director of marketing and communications.
Recently, Club Monaco launched their temporary concept store at the Michelin-starred Noma restaurant in Copenhagen. Known for their unusual Nordic delicacies, Noma now allows visitors to shop for unique vintage items, books, and handcrafted artworks alongside Club Monaco’s men and women’s apparel. The retail space utilises Nordic materials with smooth timber surfaces, fur rugs and foliage dotted around the store, creating an organic, natural atmosphere for shoppers.
A new venture for Noma, the collaboration marks the first time that a lifestyle brand has created an innovative retail concept within the restaurant. But for Club Monaco, the concept is familiar. In its flagship store in New York you can pick up fresh flowers, a great coffee-table book and meet a friend for coffee. “Club Monaco has always linked itself with the whole experience, including food and art, so it seemed like a very natural fit,” says Caroline Belhumeur, the brand’s creative director. “We want to give our customers a richer experience: there’s a feeling of discovery that relates to this collaboration as well as Club Monaco as a whole.”
A store with media in mind
The rise of online shopping has sounded the death knell for many traditional bricks-and-mortar retailers.
Fortunately, innovative brands are reimagining the physical store, turning to magazines and museums for inspiration and creating spaces where the virtual and physical worlds collide.
At a Manhattan boutique called STORY, shoppers can buy delicate lingerie or intricately decorated chocolate, scented candles or underwear made by a Swedish company called Bread & Boxers. The items for sale are built around the theme ‘Love Story’. But a few weeks from now, probably none of those items will be available for sale. “In an exceptionally rare merchandising strategy, the store relies on rotating themes, as well as rotating products,” writes The New York Times.
STORY is built on the concept of treating retail as media; it curates its merchandise every month, like a magazine would its content, likewise getting a brand to sponsor it. For example, General Electric (GE) was one of the companies that cooperated with STORY as part of an exercise to promote their new smartphone-controlled air-conditioning unit. Appropriately, the STORY theme was ‘Cool’ and the products on sale in the store – clothes, jewellery and gadgets – reflected that. GE did not take a revenue share from product sales, but has used the store as a platform to promote its product. “A product tells a much bigger story than just a transaction,” explains Sam Olstein, the global director of innovation at GE, “and, in STORY, every item has a long-tail narrative attached to it. That is really what we want to do.”
Every four to eight weeks, STORY completely reinvents itself and features a new theme, trend or issue, through merchandise selection and retail design. The store concept and its ingredients change with the seasons and the community – ranging from wellness, to men’s essentials, to art; from pasta-making classes to TED talks. It is a retail concept that goes beyond consumption. On average, most new retail concepts take about three years to turn a profit. STORY was profitable in Year One. “Don’t think about sales per square foot, but experience per square foot,” explains Rachel Shechtman, founder of STORY.
Anthropologie
Philosophy, fit, mix
Anthropologie, the US-based women’s clothing and home furnishings chain with stores in the US, Canada and UK, has cultivated a shopping experience unlike almost anything else in retail today.
From what seems to be a Tuscan dining porch, artfully packed with chipped dinnerware, rose-coloured drinking glasses and weathered, mismatched chairs alongside scattered vignettes of latticework chaise longues, velvet patchwork pillows, ornate birdcages and leather-bound books, everything about Anthropologie’s stores is meticulously calculated. Clothing is clustered in mini collections throughout the sprawling space, with the bold mix of fashion-forward pieces, laid-back staples and ethnic accents. The mood lighting, dreamy music and handcrafted art pieces give the space an overwhelmingly homey feel – and that’s very much on purpose. In an age where companies are closing brick-and-mortar stores and spending money on perfecting the e-commerce experience, Anthropologie has its eyes focused instead on its retail settings and the sensory components that attract legions of dedicated shopper.
What sets Anthropologie apart is its creation of an exceptional customer experience. “We’re customer experts,” explains Anthropologie president Glen Senk. “Our focus is on always doing what’s right for a specific customer we know very well.” Anthropologie’s unique, custom-designed spaces hold an almost magnetic appeal for an affluent and influential set of customers – a set of customers that most other retailers only dream about.
While most retailers today are obsessed with the highly lucrative and populous ‘tween’ and boomer markets, Anthropologie’s target consumer is a woman between the ages of 30 to 45 who is both affluent and individual, and who wants to reflect her unique style with what she wears. Senk also likes to describe her in psychographic terms: “She’s well read and well travelled.
She is very aware – she gets our references, whether it’s to a town in Europe or to a book or a movie. She’s urban minded. She’s into cooking, gardening, and wine.”
Anthropologie’s approach to its stores flips many of the conventions of retail on their head. For instance: selling things. Glen Senk is quick to say, “Our customers are our friends, and what we do is never, ever, ever about selling to them.” Anthropologie doesn’t advertise, and the merchandising does not highlight product so much as set a mood and create context. It is effectively a destination where they present a lifestyle, as much as a product. They envisioned a retail store that evokes hole-in-the-wall antique stores, Parisian boutiques, flea markets and Grandma’s kitchen all in one, but with a larger selection, targeting a specific consumer.
There’s no lack of “French flea market-inspired” stores and there are many other multi-brand retailers that try to implement the same basic strategy, but none have been nearly as successful. What sets Anthropologie apart is that the chain doesn’t simply sell an unprecedented mix of clothes and furnishings; they’re selling a sense of adventure and originality – and the promise of self-discovery. Of course, retailers like Ralph Lauren and Martha Stewart have always sold their sensibility along with their merchandise, but they tend to model perfection and prescribe one style, while Anthropologie offers up diverse starting points and a multitude of cues to set the customer on her own path. “I wouldn’t call it a retail store,” says architect Ron Pompei, who has led the creative direction of Anthropologie stores. “It’s a place where culture and commerce intersect. It’s more like the Silk Road — a sense of exploration mixed with the exchange of things and ideas.”
Their buyers strive to find actual items that inspire their own designs. The buying teams travel throughout Europe, Asia and Africa in search of antique stores and flea markets to seek out one-of-a-kind pieces. They distribute these ‘found objects’ within their assortment, mixing them in with other pieces designed specifically for Anthropologie. This creates a range of product that is unusual and specific to each store location. Another important concept that adds to the success of their retail store is its location. They stay away from malls, favouring a spot on the street to get that ‘village atmosphere’. They prefer to stand alone, rather than in a cluster of stores.
Anthropologie has never advertised, yet its customers stay longer in the stores than most chain shoppers. Average dwell time in an Anthropologie store is an hour and 15 minutes, and average spend per visit is about A$100. And they keep coming back. Leaving the Anthropologie store is like leaving a fantasy land – it is difficult to do. It seems there is always something more to experience. It is that lasting feeling that draws customers back every time. “One of our core philosophies,” explains Glen Senk, “is that we spend the money that other companies spend on marketing to create a store experience that exceeds people’s expectations.”
Appealing to the imagination
Successful retail concepts offer not only physical attributes to the shopper – the actual product – but they offer non-physical attributes too. The non-physical attributes are almost more important than the physical ones, since the customer associates the product with feel-good emotions and a sense of self-improvement on a higher level.
These emotions directly stimulate behaviour in buying patterns.
As Harry Selfridge, the founder of the legendary London department store, once said: “The whole art of merchandising consists of appealing to the imagination. Once the imagination is moved, the hand goes naturally to the pocket. But if the first appeal is to the purse, the imagination is apt to revolt and raise barriers against buying.”
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