Quality, value, service, innovation and trust. It’s quite a collection of words and forms the platform on which Marks & Spencer is positioning its appeal to shoppers, according to one of the graphics in its latest Westfield’s London behemoth. The strap line was repeated at the retailer’s interims last week, when the “business review” said that the five virtues had been M&S’s focus for the past four and a half years.
The 103,000 sq ft (9,570 sq m), three-floor Westfield store shows where this journey has taken M&S and should be viewed as the latest version of its much-vaunted “store of the future” – a term that has been bandied around for the past couple of years. Internally, the term has been dropped, according to M&S director of store marketing and design Nayna McIntosh, and has been replaced with the phrase “M&S Plus”.
Whichever nomenclature you decide to use, there can be little doubt that the Westfield store represents a move on from what can be seen at recent M&S store refurbishments in locations such as Birmingham, the Pantheon on Oxford Street and Bluewater. And the point about the Westfield store is that for the time being it is likely to be something of a one-off.
This should come as little surprise to those who have followed M&S’s refurbishment and new store opening saga. Throughout the initiative’s four-year history, which has seen M&S gradually reposition itself from elderly dowager to young blood, there have been questions about the return on investment. Executive chairman Sir Stuart Rose has long maintained that it needed to be done and that things would come good – in short, have faith.
Sure enough, if all its stores looked like the Westfield branch there would be good reason for confidence and for the view that M&S is still on the right track in spite of difficult trading. All of the new design elements to date have been incorporated into this showpiece. There are even some additional features that are external to the store itself.
Stand on the balcony just outside the first floor entrance and look down. You are gazing towards one of the mall’s public areas. Except that in the middle of this particular public space is a version of M&S Kitchen, the café-cum-restaurant format first seen at Canterbury a couple of years ago. The difference here is that rather than being a contained, standalone unit, M&S has opted to extend its commercial tentacles from within the store and out into the mall.
McIntosh says that the area can seat 60 and will eventually be extended to 80. So those visiting Westfield can enjoy an M&S cup of coffee or perhaps a light meal well before they consider going into the shop, or even if they don’t.
The walled oval space that houses the Kitchen has been carefully considered in order to avoid the sense that you are in a food court – an ever-present danger for those who choose to dine in a shopping centre. The wooden sides to this in-mall café corral are just high enough to promote a sense of separation from the hoi polloi and yet sufficiently low to attract outsiders in: it’s a fine balance.
Opposite this, the store windows are different too. With chromed metal surrounds that stand semi-proud of the storefront, the impression is of glass boxes that have been dropped either side of the entrance. These are multi-brand windows, so if you look at the ground floor womenswear window, for instance, you are faced by Autograph, Limited Collection and Patricia Field, as well as the core women’s ranges. This is all achieved within a single display. McIntosh says the move is about fulfilling the “every woman, every time” promise that has informed much of the retailer’s recent womenswear buying and merchandising policy. The multi-brand approach is also mirrored in the first floor menswear windows.
Stepping beyond all of this, the first thing the ground floor visitor is likely to encounter is Autograph. A concerted push is under way with regard to this brand, aimed at doubling its sales within the next three years. The range has been put into a series of frames, helping to create individual sets and segment this large floor. As M&S managed to do with its home store in Lisburn, much of this shop is about taking a substantial footprint and making it feel manageable.
Alongside the Autograph area, there is a mini-catwalk with an open-sided metal cage around it. Inside this, mannequins have been placed in action poses. It’s a feature found throughout the store’s clothing departments and is perhaps used to best effect upstairs at the front of menswear, where the normally sober shirt and tie department is given an unusual dynamism using the device.
Also noteworthy on the ground floor are the inclusion of a denim department, with large outsize letters spelling out the word in bold capitals, and a square deli-style restaurant – first seen in Bluewater – but this time in the middle of the women’s clothing department. This is a somewhat controversial move, according to McIntosh, but visiting the store a few days after it opened, there was not a seat to be had at the eat-over counter.
Upstairs, the men’s offer has been similarly segmented and M&S’s store-wide work on department definition with design consultancy Caulder Moore has clearly paid off. The upper floor also includes a new café format, a move on from the well-worn Café Revive found elsewhere, with wood-block wall and children-friendly 3D pastel-coloured graphics of teapots, eggs in eggcups and suchlike. The furniture in the café is decidedly upscale and seating areas in niches around its perimeter create the right amount of privacy in a highly visible space.
Head to the basement and the appearance of the food offer outshines that of Westfield’s lone dedicated food anchor retailer, Waitrose, albeit on a smaller scale. Much emphasis has been placed on “try before you buy” on this floor, with the cheese, bakery and wine departments standing out as particular highlights.
Across the whole of the store, a new navigation system has been installed. McIntosh says this is a trial and may appear elsewhere, but that a decision has yet to be made. Created by London-based consultancy Graphic Thought Facility, the package does appear to make finding your way around this sizeable store more straightforward.
Many other features, from fitting rooms to new equipment for the Per Una area, have been put into the store, and visiting the Westfield M&S and then visiting a regular branch is a bit like going to a posh restaurant and then dining at a cut-price eaterie. In both cases the upscale experience becomes the benchmark by which you judge everything else and you wish that all others could be like it.
The trouble is, that can’t be done – largely because the market for upscale environments is limited and payback may ultimately prove difficult. At the presentation made to analysts last week, marketing director Stephen Sharp said that modular elements of the Westfield store, such as the flower, cheese and wine shops found in the basement, will be rolled out. If this proves to be the case, M&S will be in better shape than many when we eventually emerge from the recession.
Size: 103,000 sq ft (9,570 sq m)
Design: in-house, Caulder Moore and Graphic Thought Facility
Features of note: new-format in-store café, department segmentation, new in-store navigation and shop-within-shops on the food floor
Roll-out potential: will depend on M&S’s ability to value-engineer the store’s new elements to the point where they can be more widely used
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