Selfridge: a pioneer of retail theatre

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The rags-to-riches-to-rags story of Harry Gordon Selfridge will make great viewing when it appears as a TV series in 2013.

He started life from humble beginnings in Wisconsin, USA, before going to work for Marshall Fields in Chicago.

He made his way up from sales assistant to running the store that still stands today on State Street in Chicago – 1 million sq ft of selling space, twice the size of Selfridges on Oxford Street.

After falling out with the family owners, he came to London at the start of the 20th century with the idea of recreating the Marshall Fields store.

At that time, the original West End shopping district was around Queensway and Westbourne Grove, where William Whiteley had opened a department store in the 1860s.

Gordon found a site in a secondary shopping location called Oxford Street. He used the same architect, Daniel Burnham, who designed the Marshall Fields store, hence the grand architectural space that you see today with high floor-to-ceiling heights, Corinthian columns and brass plaques.

He opened in 1909, describing it as “not a department store – but a community centre” and saying “everyone is welcome”. Selfridge was the first to pioneer shopping as theatre while making it an experience using events to entice people into the store.

Gordon was a huge personality on the London social scene, effectively acting as an advertisement for the store by his own persona and regularly appearing in the gossip columns. At one stage he befriended twin sisters, Jennie and Rosie Dolly, from which the phrase ‘dolly birds’ emanates.

The store was a huge success, although with Gordon’s propensity for extravagance it never made the necessary financial returns and eventually he lost control of the business to the bank. Of course, this is all too familiar. In retail we still have the larger-than-life characters, new concepts that start out with bold ambitions, and a fundamental need to ensure that our propositions are differentiated and relevant.

Sadly in this difficult economic climate, we have too many companies that have over-expanded, lost track of the consumer, and not reacted to the shopping behaviour of the customer.

Today, it is almost impossible to imagine anyone in the ‘bricks’ world taking a financial risk on the scale of a Gordon Selfridge.

Only in the ‘clicks’ world do we see companies, such as Amazon and Asos, create propositions that are step-changing the consumer experience.

20 years ago at Selfridges we were debating changes to the internal architecture of the building, particularly how to improve customer circulation between the floors as part of the masterplan that changed the Oxford Street store from Grace Brothers, as it then resembled, to the fantastic shop you see today.

We had decided to install four sets of open escalators with wide apertures, and, to give customers better orientation within each floor, we created a central atrium which removed nearly 25,000 sq ft of selling space from the store – heresy for a retailer.

Having decided on what was to prove one of the key factors in the renaissance of the Oxford Street store, there was a lull in the conversation as we reflected on whether we were doing the right thing.

I asked the question “What would Gordon have thought of all of this?” And I think he would have been very proud and pleased.