The good Dr

News that the owner of bovver brand Dr Martens has appointed Rothschild to explore the possibility of selling it for up to £120m (according to the Sunday Times) shouldn’t come as a complete surprise. For a long time, Dr Martens was the footwear of choice for erstwhile 1980s CND activists and, at the other end of the scale, for BNP thugs, among others.

Then suddenly, and it’s hard to pinpoint exactly when, the franchise was broadened, as was the range, and it morphed into a fashion essential worn by anybody who wanted to demonstrate that they are in touch with the zeitgeist. This transformation was helped, in very large measure, by the shops from which the footwear is sold. Broadly, things, ermm, kicked off, when the Dr Marten’s pop-up shop opened in Spitalfields Market in 2009 – just as the area was moving into the mainstream among the fashion set. The brand had, of course, been in favour for some time prior to this, but the store seemed to give things a major nudge – not least for the number of column inches that it garnered.

Since then, the Covent Garden store has enjoyed a renaissance and branded outlets have appeared in locations as various as Hamburg, New York City, Leeds, Cardiff and Paris. The real point about them however is that every store is different, although recognizably from the same branded stable. What Dr Martens has succeeded in doing is rolling out a brand without indulging in a Xeroxed roll-out where everything looks the same everywhere.

This seems to have paid dividends and it does make the business of coming across one of these stores interesting every time it happens. The same might be said of Australian skincare brand Aesop, which has been slowly colonising London for the past few years with beautiful stores that are all different – it’s about creating an experience.

For both brands, the outcome is stores that work in many different locations, principally by employing a degree of sympathy to a specific site rather than beaming down fully-formed from planet Zarg.

In tough times, success in retail is about offering difference, not just from your neighbours, but probably from others branches in a chain. High street operators could do worse than consider the lessons provided by the good Dr.