Analysis: Artist supplies retailer Cass Art arrives in Kingston

Kingston upon Thames is a good place to live, if you can afford it. Most of the shops are well represented, there’s the river, and Hampton Court is just down the road. There is also a well-known art school, attracting talent from across the country.

And, perhaps for this reason, artist supplies retailer Cass Art opened a store in December 2012 that is a few minutes walk from the art college, and also a stone’s throw from the town’s retail heart. Cass Art chief executive James Bidwell says Kingston was an obvious choice for a new store: “We look at the cultural content of a town when opening a store. We only have six stores at the moment, but we’re planning to have 20 within the next three or four years.”

He continues: “We’re aiming at a multichannel strategy. At the moment, we’re one of the few retailers that doesn’t have a transactional website. We’re opening one this year and the good news is that we don’t have large numbers of legacy stores to deal with.”

The store, which was designed by consultancy Pentagram, which has had Cass Art among its clients for years, is hard to miss. The strapline ‘Let’s fill this town with artists’ is emblazoned across the fascia in a black font against a
white background. A bus stop-style sign protrudes from the building stating ‘Cass Art London’ in the same no-nonsense stencil-style font and the rest of the fascia is a mix of black metal and glass.

“Black and white is the way ahead [the other stores include an element of red as part of the identity]. There’s an irony about it given that most of our customers are engaged with colour,” says Bidwell. The spare-looking shopfront is also symptomatic of what Russell terms “a hardening up of what we’ve done before”.

Digital direction

As well as the monochrome exterior that greets passers-by, the interior provides a canvas for the product and does not seek to upstage it.

Standing on the store’s threshold, one of the things that the artistic shopper may notice is the lightbox to the right just inside the door. This is a new departure for Cass Art and Bidwell says it is indicative of the retailer’s digital direction of future travel.

The lightbox, which features moving content, is embedded as part of the store entrance, which is black as it is formed of charred wood. Russell says this is an example of Yakisugi - a traditional Japanese method of preserving wood. For the purpose of the store, it provides a suitably artisanal textured context for the visitor and, as well as the entrance, the cash desk has also been clad in wood that has been Yakisugied.

At the front of the store is a display table bearing items relating to the Manet exhibition currently running at the Royal Academy. Bidwell says linking with exhibitions of this kind is a good way to cement the relationship between the shop and the broader art world.

Glancing up, the next thing the shopper is likely to notice is that the font and colour scheme used for the exterior have been incorporated into a frieze that runs around the top part of the perimeter. Anyone taking the time to read this may notice that colour is painted in words with names such as ‘Charcoal Grey’, ‘Tiziano Red’ and ‘Naples Yellow’, all being given the bold font treatment.

Bidwell says this is about talking about art and artists’ materials to the customer in words rather than pictures. Beneath the frieze are custom-made perimeter, open-front cabinets that contain paints in a variety of different-sized tubes. Each tube of paint is suspended by its screw-top, meaning that each perimeter module has been planned for and is bespoke. On the left-hand side of the shop is the cash desk and sundry types of paper on which to draw, paint and suchlike.

A careful selection

The store is about half the size of the Islington branch, according to Bidwell, who says it has meant a careful edit of the product ranges. “You walk into many artists’ materials shops and they seem to cram everything in. We have 6,500 SKUs here, which really is an edit, but we’ve backed what we believe in. It’s a matter of having the right stock levels.”

He adds that efforts have been made to enlarge the Cass Art own-brand product range in a collaboration with Pentagram, which has designed the graphics that sit on the front of each block of drawing paper. And, as part of a push towards improving margins, the own-brand products are given pride of place in a mid-shop location, just behind the initial Manet display table.

At the back of the shop is a kids’ art materials area. Once more there is a frieze around the perimeter, but this time an ochre yellow has been injected in place of the white background and there is a much greater emphasis on boxed sets of painting materials and objects that can be painted (papier mâché animals, for instance). The legend ‘every child is an artist’ is probably aimed more at parents than children, but the point is clearly made and there is much that is eye-catching.

The store was previously a camera shop with a suspended ceiling. Russell says this was removed as part of the “hardening up” process when possession of the space was taken. It revealed a coffered concrete ceiling to which gantries of LED lights were attached. The floor is equally uncompromising. In place of the wooden floors of the other Cass Art stores, the Kingston branch has porcelain tiles - giving it a functional feel.

Bidwell says the Kingston store “looks clearer, cleaner and is easier to shop” and it will form the template for future openings. Meanwhile, for Kingston’s art students and for the more general population, this looks like a destination store in the making. You won’t arrive here by accident, but having made the journey, both store environment and product range will probably mean extended dwell times and purchases.