Birmingham, retail laboratory

I was up in Birmingham for our sister event Spring Fair on Monday afternoon, where the whole of the NEC is taken over by home and giftware suppliers selling their wares. The products on offer range from the ingenious to the downright tacky but even though it’s hard going on the legs, it’s a fantastic event and great to see so many suppliers, many of them British, selling innovative products designed to achieve the ever more difficult task of capturing consumers’ attention.

I hadn’t been to Birmingham for ages so before heading back yesterday morning I took a tour of the shops with our store design guru John Ryan. The stores were all empty, unsurprisingly as it wasn’t much after 10, so it was a good chance to get a real feel for their design.

First stop was Dixons’s new Black concept store on the High Street. First thing to say is it’s really different, and full marks to the company for giving it a go. It’s an unashamed attempt to capture some of the Apple magic, with banks of tables to play with product on, lots of interactive features and sofas to sit and have a coffee on while surfing the web.

The thing Apple gets right every time is flawless execution, and while the staff were really enthusiastic and fulsome in their greetings - to be fair they probably thought we were from head office - there were a few rough edges. In the basement, nearly all the televisions were turned off, leaving the area particularly gloomy. Some of the touch screen devices we touched didn’t work or were very slow.

I would really love the concept to work, but rather like Best Buy, the ‘Black’ brand has no recognition and the old cynic in me can’t see it being rolled out. What’s probably more likely is that some of the very good design and ‘play’ features from the store might be put into other stores, and hopefully the service initiaitves too.

Then on to Forever 21. First thing to say is it’s massive. It’s paid top dollar for all the space it’s taken so far in Dublin and London as well as the Bull Ring, and the Birmingham store is a brave statement of intent. I liked it. The product looks good and is at very attractive price points, and the store is well-merchandised, with plenty of space for circulating and attractive VM. One small gripe is that the tiny proportion of the store given over to menswear probably isn’t worth the effort. Apparently it’s trading well but it will need to if it’s going to be profitable given the amount of prime space it’s in.

So two very different concepts, but two which make Birmingham an interesting place to visit right now. The new Hollister store - where the now familiar ‘Casa’ appears entirely behind a glass wall at the front of the Bull Ring - is also very striking, and Birmingham’s retail scene certainly puts to bed the cliche of the city’s dowdy image of old.

The only counterpoint to this story is when experiments go wrong, and there aren’t many more depressing sights in retail than the Mailbox. While its Harvey Nichols does a fine job for catering for the upper echelons of West Midlands society, thanks to the marvellous Kevin Breese who runs the store, the rest of the shops in there must be dying a death.

Many of the retail units are empty and only a handful are hanging on, including All Saints and Thomas Pink, while the focus of those units which are trading seems to have shifted to services rather than retail. The reason isn’t hard to find - it’s just nowhere near anything else in the city centre. A reminder that the maxim of location, location, location is still everything when it comes to bricks and mortar retailing,