Use what's there

So what do you do with extra space when you’ve finished putting your new store together? Solutions vary from mothballing to using the generally unwanted square metres as an overspill stockroom. Both are perfectly acceptable and for many are part and parcel of the business of acquiring a suitable site: it goes with the territory.
Occasionally however you see an imaginative and creative use of a floor or an extra room that makes you realise what is possible. And one of the better examples of this being done has to be the Jack Wills flagship in the highly affluent surroundings of Islington’s Upper Street.
Forget for a moment the almost inevitable names of the assistants serving customers on the final Saturday before Christmas - “Drew” and “Harriet” being typical, and forget the truculent youth and their upscale parents, all drooling over the product and head instead for the basement. In many shops of this kind, this would have been a redundant floor - equivalent in size to the fully traded ground floor. For the canny folk at Jack Wills however, it represented an obvious opportunity.
Arriving dowstairs, the first thing you’ll probably notice is the mid-floor pool table. Now look at the sofas, all vintage brown leather Chesterfields and then glance to the far left-hand corner. There’s an open door and the lit room to which it provides access contains a bed - covered with a brightly-coloured checked duvet - a fitting room perhaps?. All this and running along the back wall of the floor is a low stage.
Got it! This is actually a rather well appointed gig room, where the young and relatively hip can come and see aspiring pop bands treading the boards and rattling the eardrums of onlookers. The point about this use of space is not that it is vastly unusual, it has been done elsewhere, but that it is open.
More often than not, when there is what amounts to an activity room, it is kept roped off and only opened when there is something happening. Yet in this branch of Jack Wills it was as freely accessible as the floor filled with stock above it. Watching a lone visitor inspecting the basement there was a single remarkable thing about him: he had a smile on his face. Hardly surprising, there is a generosity of spirit about what’s been done here that is rarely encountered and it does rather leave you feeling that you might consider a purchase, even if the prices are a mite eye-watering.
Space is there to be used and just a small investment is capable of paying dividends, even if it isn’t filled with merchandise. Oh yes, and upstairs the shop was doing a roaring trade.