Why JD Sports is doubling down on its world-leading Stratford Westfield store

The sports fashion retailer’s newly revamped ‘Just Landed’ concept store at London’s Westfield Stratford now has the highest turnover across its global portfolio. 

The store was expanded to 29,000 sq ft in April and the new format flagship has quickly become JD Sports’ best-performing store, ahead of other iconic locations such as Oxford Street in central London, Liverpool, Dublin and Times Square in New York. 

Global managing director Mike Armstrong says that while the brand was already well established in the Stratford centre, the expansion to the new format was necessary for growth. 

“Consumers [in Stratford] are 20% more likely to shop at JD than the average that we see across the whole country, so it’s a really friendly marketplace for us. And we believe, prior to opening this store, there was about an 8% market share opportunity available to us to capture. 

“We’ve grown as a business within the community as the locality has changed significantly with the investment from the Olympics in 2011 when the mall first opened. And this was actually the store that first opened back then. And we realised fairly quickly it was going to be nowhere near big enough to capture the opportunity that was there for us.” 

Stratford is now the biggest JD store in the world and will act as a blueprint for the retailer’s store rollout globally from here on out – starting with four new locations in the UK and one in the Republic of Ireland over the next 12 months at Meadowhall, Sheffield; Buchanan Street, Glasgow; Lakeside Shopping Centre, Essex; and Bluewater Shopping Centre, Kent, plus Dundrum in Dublin, Ireland.  

Armstrong says the retailer’s target is to have 200 of the new format stores around the world by the end of the year. 

Brand builders

JD’s strength over its competitors has long been its powerful partnerships with big brands. However, as chief executive Régis Schultz recently warned, the sportswear market has been volatile recently and has suffered from a lack of innovation from global brand giants like Nike and Adidas. 

After Nike posted an 8% decline in sales in its second quarter, concerns about younger brands like On, Hoka and New Balance taking up market share have risen, signalling a shift in dynamics in the sportswear market. 

So is Armstrong concerned that customers have reached peak Nike? 

“I think anybody that has written Nike off probably needs to go back and look at the history of the brand and the sportswear marketplace over the last 30 to 40 years,” he says. “Nike will be just fine.” 

And while the retail leader isn’t worried about Nike and Adidas, he believes the popularity of new sportswear brands offers JD new opportunities. 

“Essentially, we are in the fashion business. And we are a sports fashion retailer. Fundamentally, it’s about what consumers are asking for. As they evolve, we have a responsibility to do that too. We have partnerships with lots of amazing brands and you’ve seen how strongly they show up in the stores. And that’s just the business.” 

Loyalty app

The retailer launched the JD Status loyalty app and scheme in the UK in October last year after its successful run in the US market. Since then the app has seen over 1.6 million downloads in the country with nearly 1.5 million active users. Armstrong says that the average spend of a customer jumped 40% after they signed up to the scheme.

While JD is in the early stages of its loyalty scheme journey, Armstrong says it’s taking its cues from everyone, including supermarket giants Tesco and Sainsbury’s, to ensure JD is offering its customers the best experience it can.

“We’re looking across the whole marketplace in terms of what everybody’s doing. But, first and foremost for us is making sure that it’s aligned to what people are looking for from a loyalty program,” he says. 

“That’s why we want to expand it to more broader reaching capabilities to encapsulate everything that young people get up to in their lives. And also the thing that the business can offer them, whether its applied nutrition or you know, a lot of other things within the business that we can pull into.”