Signed, sealed and delivered?

Back in March, Clinton Cards, the family retail business with a stock market listing, issued interim results that shocked observers. Pre-tax profit for the first half of the retailer’s 2011 financial year was down by a little over 40% and the management statement that accompanied this was downbeat.

In a sense, the surprising thing about the whole story was that this hadn’t occurred a little sooner. Clinton Cards may be part of the “architecture of the British high street”, as Steve James-Royle, director at design consultancy The Yard puts it, but then so was Woolworths. The real question that needed answering was what could be done to improve things.

To a large degree, the answer begins and ends in the stores. Clinton Cards has indeed been around a while, since 1968 to be precise, and its shops – there are more than 600 of them – look, in many cases, like a modest slice of yesteryear. Take the Oxford Street store, for example. Given its location, this should be one of the jewels in the Clinton crown. Yet stand at the entrance to the store, look in and the view is slat-wall with large quantities of British souvenir merchandise in the mid-shop.

“They’re in the emotion business and they just weren’t quite capturing that,”

Steve James-Royle, The Yard

This is hardly inspiring. Venture inside and the pieces of gaffer tape used to patch over holes in the carpet on the stairs and the supermarket-style checkouts in the basement add to the sense that this is a store in need of a makeover. All of which could be overlooked if this were the exception, but it is not.

Marked card

A chain with a problem therefore and the drastic decline in the retailer’s fortunes may, in large measure, have been responsible for the decision to do something about the way the stores looked. The move to change things in fact began about six months ago, according to buying and marketing director John Robinson, and part of the outcome of that process can be seen in the revamped St Albans store. This branch boasts a brand new interior design and fit-out and it (re)-opened at the end of last month.

Stand in front of this Clinton Cards store and the view is markedly different from Oxford Street. For a start, there’s the name. The familiar Clinton Cards logo has been severely truncated and this 1,650 sq ft branch, which has been worked on by The Yard, is now simply ‘Clintons’. There is also a small deep magenta square to the right-hand side of the fascia bearing the legend ‘Est 1968’. This looks like an attempt to mark Clintons as an historic element in historic St Albans. It does at least have the benefit of being relatively subdued.

Relative, that is, to the rest of the store front, which is very orange indeed. As a brand, Clinton Cards’ association with orange is well-documented, but this is a deal more in-your-face than normal and as well as the name, the window has a simple graphic with the words, in white, ‘Cards, Gift, Wrap, Party’. If you look carefully at the glass-line immediately above the door, there is a strapline: ‘Because it matters’, a theme repeated within the shop.

Spaced out

And that’s about it. On the day of visiting, which was about an hour before Prince William and Kate Middleton became the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, the remainder of the two windows was filled with royal wedding bunting and stuff you might have regretted buying but that probably proved very saleable. Heading indoors it was easy to see the difference between this store and a more usual Clinton Cards. The most obvious variance was that there is space, lots of it.

The reason for this is straightforward. The mammoth gondola and assorted pieces of equipment, as well as the myriad different types of point of sale have been banished in place of a more restful and lower interior storescape. There are still tiered gondolas, of course, but these do not interrupt the view to the back of the shop and in-store navigation is improved massively as a result.

“They’re [Clinton Cards] in the emotion business and they just weren’t quite capturing that,” says James-Royle. It’s a moot point whether shoppers will feel any particular tug at the heartstrings when they wander into this store, but they will certainly find it easier to get to what they want. This is principally due to a simplified graphics package that directs shoppers by gender and then by occasion. “The communications package has been really simplified,” says James-Royle. He notes that Clinton Cards was characterised by a lot of supplier point-of-sale material. This has meant, in some cases, interiors that looked as if they were repositories for suppliers rather than a branded whole.

And to the left-hand side of the entrance, Clintons appears to have taken a leaf out of the Waterstone’s store interior design book. A sign on the upper perimeter announces: ‘Clintons staff favourites of the month’. Beneath this, there is a tiered wall unit of selected cards – although the reason for choosing one of these over any other card remains unclear, in spite of the staff endorsement.

In general, the interior is beige, with teak-look tables in the mid shop and a beige carpet with a pattern of coloured horizontal lines to lift things a bit. The wall behind the cash desk bears the same ‘Because it matters’ message found on the store exterior and is white against the same bright orange that dominates the view as you approach the shop.

The retailer has also taken a step into the digital age with an augmented reality card kiosk towards the back of
the shop, where customers can play games as they make their choices. Much has been made of this by Clintons, but it seems more likely that shoppers will prefer to read the graphics around the shop that provide tips on such things as how to wrap a present. This is good, practical advice for those for whom the business of buying a gift is less onerous than the wrapping marathon that follows.

Stamp of approval

The big question is will it persuade more shoppers to walk into a branch of Clintons? Perhaps. This is certainly an improvement on other stores in the chain, albeit the choice of colour may seem a mite garish.

The other point is that the luxury of space makes the matter of choosing an altogether more pleasant experience. But can this interior be replicated elsewhere and will Clinton Cards, given its recent trading statement, be in a position to do so? Robinson is bullish: “I’d like to move really quickly on it. We need to make decisions quickly and I’m talking weeks rather than months.” There are three other trial stores with slightly differing treatments, in Uxbridge, Nottingham and Bristol, and if the roll-out button is pushed, it will be interesting to see which parts of the St Albans trial are taken forward.

There remains the point that this store still has some serious competitors, such as Scribbler, Paperchase and even WHSmith, and there are also a fair few players at the budget end of the market. This may be a solution to Clinton Cards’ problems, but on the face of it, it does not look like the final solution.