In pictures: New Look reviews results from refurbished stores

There would be few who have followed the fortunes of value fashion retailer New Look who would claim that its recent history has been an uninterrupted upward path.

Indeed, it is one of the high street’s stalwarts that appears to have progressed in fits and starts as it has tried to maintain its relevance for its predominantly female shoppers.

Whether it’s the swathes of high-profile management departures or the drip, drip, drip of media reports relating that all is not as it should be at the fashion giant, times have not been entirely happy.

That said, this remains an outfit that demonstrates an almost Houdini-like ability to wriggle out of tricky situations and emerge with something that’s worth taking a look at.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the handful of trial stores that are massively outperforming the chain as a whole, according to customer and multichannel managing director Guy Lister.

The branches are in High Wycombe, Nottingham, Taunton and Dorchester. The latter was a refurbishment that opened last Friday, and by 1pm Lister was ready to take a sportsman’s bet it would double the numbers taken in the branch a year earlier.

This, of course, says one of two things – either this is an outstanding result, or the figures for the same day in 2011 were pretty lamentable. Whichever is the case, things are clearly on the up in Dorchester and the other trial stores, which vary in size from a mite under 3,000 sq ft to the Nottingham “brand flag” store, which measures 29,000 sq ft.

Or put another way, New Look has been testing its new look in a range of store sizes from local minnow to regional giant. And what greets shoppers is certainly a change from the prospect in the other 676 stores that comprise the retailer’s portfolio.

Setting the scene

Created by consultancy Checkland Kindleysides, change is apparent from the moment an approach towards the High Wycombe store is made, with a logo that takes the overly abstracted New Look sign of old and replaces it with a somewhat more down-to-earth version. It’s not a major change, but it does serve to set the scene for what follows in the store.

Lister says the brief given to the designers was to create an interior that would be flexible, but which would focus on “four key categories”: denim, footwear, going out and casual. The aim was that anyone visiting the refurbished High Wycombe store (as the first trial shop to receive a makeover, it has been trading in this form since December) would be able to see all these elements at a glance upon entering.

And this is certainly the case, with denim to the right, shoes in a semi- discrete space at the back of the shop and the other two components visible between this. Rather more to the point, this does not look like an undifferentiated mass of stock – a complaint that could be levelled at more than a few of the retailer’s other branches.

It’s worth considering how this has been done. There is no walkway to take you through the space and signage has been used sparingly, to the extent that you are aware there are key value-led pieces (for example, blue denim at £9.99), but not so you are overwhelmed.

Perhaps more to the point, the space is broken up by a circular feature in the middle of the shop, at present home to beachwear, ensuring this is not a wide-open-spaces-style white box with double-hanging around the perimeter. There are, naturally, double-hanging modules around the perimeter, but because of the manner in which the layout has been handled, this does not become a negative.

Simple but effective

The denim department has also had a facelift, when set against the New Look standard, with a faux brick wall used as a backing and tabled merchandise in front. It’s relatively simple stuff, but each merchandise department has its own space and character, making it different from elsewhere across the chain.

From the outset, signs direct shoppers to ‘Shoe Heaven’ at the rear and are indicative of a “lightness of tone that will help people forget about the recession”, according to Lister. Maybe so, and there were certainly a large number of people trying on the many styles on offer – which continue to make New Look the UK’s biggest retailer of shoes by volume.

And when the journey around the store is complete, the cash desk is suitably modish with light boxes showing models wearing the stock set in a dark surround… and purchases were being made. Still to come are tablets that will be installed in coming months in 10 stores and then assessed.

The real question, however, is how quickly the interior created for High Wycombe and the other trial stores will appear across the rest of the chain. Lister says eight stores a week will receive the treatment from May and that by the end of the financial year 124 stores will have been converted. At this point he takes another sportsman’s bet and says this figure is likely to be closer to 150.

Less is more

There is, though, the little matter of the other 530 or so stores, and Lister admits that with the push to “double last year’s online turnover of £72m”, some branches may ultimately prove surplus to requirements. He says that as lease renewals fall due in the next two years, up to 50 stores might be shuttered.

So, action is being taken not just to improve what’s already there, but also to do something about an estate that does look, in the current climate, to be a mild liability in terms of size. At the time of writing, Lister was taking a break from rallying the troops (aka branch managers) at a conference in London’s Centre Point, telling how the New Look future was shaping up. “They’ve read the press and we’re anxious to tell them the good news and the atmosphere is actually pretty pumped,” he says.

There is still a lot of work to do before New Look is off the potentially endangered list, but the indications are that the steps being taken may go some way to improving the longer-term outlook.