Analysis: H&M’s new fashion format & Other Stories

Imagine this. You want to create a new format. It will be aimed at a customer that you probably aren’t currently engaging with and it will be desired by her. That seems to have been the underlying intention behind the opening of & Other Stories, a new format from H&M that opened on March 8 on Regent Street.

As far as fashion is concerned, there are a few options provided by the Swedish giant. There’s the core H&M stores -purveyors of fast-moving value fashion, then there’s Cos, the more grown-up H&M brand where prices are higher and catwalk comes to mind. And there are also the brands that have been acquired as standalone stores, including Monki, Cheap Monday and Weekday (the latter is not currently available in the UK). On which reckoning, it might seem fair to assume that H&M has its portion of the budget and mid-market fashion arena pretty much sewn up. Not so, if the arrival of & Other Stories is anything to judge by.

This is higher priced than H&M and the style appears to target a slightly older shopper, but not much. On which reckoning, it seems fair to say this is about maintaining interest by offering something new that happens not to be H&M or Cos, but which while it emanates from the same stable hasn’t been seen before.

Starting out

When Cos first opened, a few years ago, also on Regent Street, H&M restricted the number of branches and, for a considerable time, the only place in which the range could be accessed in the UK was central London. Its distribution is still limited, but stores can be found elsewhere, now that it has proved its worth. It’s a pattern that is likely to be replicated with & Other Stories, but for the time being at least, Regent Street seems set to be the only place where it will be encountered.

And passing by this & Other Stories store, it’s hard not to stop and take a quick look, if only because of the minimalist take on presentation, with body forms in one window and upper torsos for jewellery in the other, either side of the Regent Street entrance. There are in fact two means of ingress to the store - the main one being via Regent Street, but there is a further entrance via the rear of the store that backs onto the pedestrianised part of Argyll Street. The latter has a single large window with slatted wooden plinths on which leather bags are displayed.

All of the window displays have translucent shower curtain-style backdrops on which the name of the store has been written multiple times in a faux handwritten font. And all is flooded in white light via large photographer’s studio standard lights that create the sense of a fashion set even before the shopper enters the store.

Backstage show

Step inside the store and the point of this tactic becomes clear. The interior has been created to remind the shopper of what it might look like backstage at a fashion show just ahead of curtain-up and the music starting. The freestanding photographer’s lights that featured in the window are everywhere and much of the stock is displayed around the perimeter on white painted runner rails.

The front of the ground floor, just inside the Regent Street entrance, is devoted to womenswear and the sense of fashion show, backstage chaos is reinforced by tickets that have been attached to the top of these showing the garments being worn. Prices are similarly displayed.

Move deeper into the store and a mid-shop staircase hoves into view. The balustrades for this are composed of sprayed white metal mesh and the staircase well has been opened to provide a central atrium for this relatively narrow shop. Beyond this, it’s beauty - right through to the store exit onto Argyll Street.

This part of the shop is primarily concerned with mid-shop fixturing and while this is simple, the lighting scheme, which pinpoints the stock while keeping ambient levels low, does much to add a sense of drama to the view. This is achieved owing to the black spotlights that run on overhead gantries the length of the shop.

The outcome is a strong focus on product, the packaging for which has been kept minimal and with white once more predominant. Mirrors are positioned against the pillars while the shelving for the freestanding fixtures feels as if it might not exist, owing to the dense product merchandising and the neutral tones of the equipment.

Fashion fix

As in the fashion area, the signage is simple and looks as if it has been applied as an afterthought - in keeping with the backstage fashion show ambiance.

According to H&M, the store’s fashion displays have been divided up into collections that are supposed to bring to mind four major cities: Paris, Stockholm, New York and Berlin, with areas given to merchandise that is representative of each city. And a member of staff was keen to point out the differences between the collections in the footwear area at the back of the shop on the first floor. Yet while the stock looked good, it was quite hard to discern which shoe belonged to which city or indeed why.

As on the ground floor, the layout on the first floor has accessories at the back of the shop and fashion at the front with the cash desk running along the left-hand perimeter wall midway between the two. Merchandising principles are broadly the same as on the ground floor and the rough and ready feel is continued.

In its previous avatar as a Mamas & Papas store, both floors had a suspended ceiling. This has been stripped out, leaving a concrete coffered ceiling to which the lighting gantries have been attached and, overall, there is a temporary feel to what is on view.

This is, of course, an illusion and this shop is set to become part of the Regent Street landscape in the same way as the nearby Cos and H&M branches. What it marks is another step along the road towards the creeping hegemony of H&M and Inditex in the Regent Street and Oxford Street areas of London’s West End. There is nothing wrong with this - both groups have succeeded by being better than others at what they do and this new format from H&M shows how carefully everything is rehearsed before it is revealed to a waiting shopping world. & Other Stories may rank as one of the most unusual names for a mass market retail format yet and may be questionable, but it does work in terms of being different from the other H&M fascias along the strip.