As Frasers gives its department store website a makeover to mirror its in-store shopping experience, Retail Week takes a closer look at the strategy behind the move and wonders if other retailers should follow suit?
House of Fraser, the department store brand under Mike Ashley’s Frasers Group, was given a revamp last week as part of the retailer’s wider digital elevation strategy.
The ecommerce website and app, simply called Frasers, allows customers to shop from all the company’s fascias, including Sports Direct, Game and Sofa.com, in one place.
This mirrors the retailer’s offline strategy. Frasers has recently been ramping up its physical estate expansion, buying shopping centres across the country and filling them with some of its own multi-brand anchor shops, such as Frasers, Flannels and Sports Direct, all at the same location.
Retail Week takes a look at this umbrella strategy and asks whether other retailers can learn from its example.
A much-needed refresh
When Mike Ashley acquired the House of Fraser brand in 2018, it had 59 stores across the UK. Since the brand shut its Cabot Circus location earlier this month, there are just 15 physical House of Fraser stores remaining.
In the meantime, the retailer has been replacing these stores with multi-brand anchor fascias. The sites have a similar layout to department stores with dedicated areas for the brands in the company’s portfolio, including Sports Direct, Game and Sofa.com.
While the House of Fraser department store slowly disappears from the high street as it clearly doesn’t fit into the group’s wider strategy, its rebrand to Frasers makes perfect sense.
According to retail technology consultant Miya Knights, the move ensures there is consistency in the retailer’s offline and online strategies.
“The website rebrand is establishing consistency with their physical retail strategy. So they’re pursuing an omnichannel strategy where the consumer won’t see any difference between the way Frasers presents itself online or physically in-store,” she says.
But while consistency is important for any business, retail analyst Nick Bubb has doubts that the move will lead to positive results for the retailer.
He says: “I guess it makes some sort of sense to make the other group fashion brands available on the website, but I don’t think many of those customers will be looking for video games, bikes or sofas.
“It’s the same strategy as stuffing all this random collection of ‘brands’ into old department stores/shopping centres. It may suit the group to try this on, but I don’t think consumers are bothered about who owns all the brands.
“Plus, if these brands were so strong in the first place, they wouldn’t have gone bust and ended up in the hands of the administrators.”
Is there a takeaway for other retailers?
Frasers may be on the right track as it attempts to simplify its large brand portfolio for customers and maintain consistency both in-store and online. But there’s very little other retailers can benefit from since few businesses have a multi-brand offering like Frasers.
Knights says: “There aren’t that many retailers that can go away and do the same thing, that are in a similar position or have a similar business model. If you can name me another retailer that operates a similar model, then absolutely that would be the right thing for that retailer to do.
“But Fraser’s group is pretty unique in that they’ve gone about building up their portfolio brands by buying distressed brands and putting them either online only or buying multi-site retail locations where they can put lots of shops within the shopping mall.”
And when it comes to the question of in-store shaping online strategy – or vice versa – it seems there’s no one right way of doing things.
Knights says: “Every single channel is equal. One is not above the other. I would say traditional retailers probably feel that online cannibalises in-store, and so they’d prefer to rely on the traditional in-store model and replicate that online. But there’s no guarantee that would work.
“And why would you create a UK retail store layout online for digital customers who are borderless and not used to shopping in a UK retail store? You’ve got to test and learn and find a happy medium between the two.”
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