Avanti: C&A’s value zeitgeist

It’s funny how quickly we forget. Mention the name C&A to people in the UK these days and there is a look of bemusement. People fall into two camps: those who believe it is still in the UK and wonder where it is and those who imagine that the clothing retailer went bust around the turn of the millennium.

Neither is correct and the better-informed will be aware that the original Euro-retailer, operating from offices in Dorf and Brussels, is alive, well and has been expanding eastwards ever since it gave up the UK as a bad job in 2000.

The low-profile company has also been doing more than merely seeking to replicate its somewhat quaint logo across all parts of continental Europe, principally by seeking to exploit some of the loyalty surrounding a number of its in-house private-label brands.

Among these is Avanti. In its C&A heyday, Avanti was a label for young fashion-conscious men and was the retailer’s male equivalent of Clockhouse, the well-worn fashion name that was a byword for cheap, disposable fashion in pre-Primark, pre-H&M days. There have been a number of standalone Clockhouses, linked to C&A stores, for some years now. But the Avanti name was put on ice in the late 1990s and more or less disappeared from the public gaze until recently, when it was brought out of cold storage. Now, the budget fashion proposition has been reborn in the form of standalone stores and extended to womens- and childrenswear.

The difference between this and the Clockhouse standalone shops is that there is no reference to the C&A parent company in them. This means that shoppers frequenting any of the five pilot Avanti stores that have opened since March may be aware of the brand’s provenance, yet it is equally possible that they may not, according to Andreas Seitz, C&A marketing chief and member of the retailer’s European operating board.

Standing outside the three-floor, 30,140 sq ft (2,800 sq m) Avanti store in Gelsenkirchen, a former mining town in northwest Germany, there is no obvious brand link between it and C&A, even though there is a branch of C&A less than 100m along the pedestrianised street.

This proves that C&A is keen to expand its sphere of activities with a store that is completely different in look and feel from the usual shape of its branches. In a rare interview, Seitz explains that, with the Europe-wide expansion of the luxury market and the incursions into the mid-market made by value retailers, C&A’s six-strong board felt that there was a place for an offer that would put a premium on fashion as well as value.

In Avanti Gelsenkirchen, a general rule of thumb seems to be that a lot of what is on display has to be under a tenner – euros, that is. This is the kind of value retailing where a pair of jeans cost about£6, a price point that will be familiar to Primark shoppers.

There is much else about this store that might bring Primark to mind, with its mix of style and cheap merchandise. Seitz says this is the first time an offer of this kind has been created in mainland Europe, although he readily admits the same claim cannot be made for the UK.

Orange ambience

But while there are similarities in ethos to Primark, the execution is different. For a start, there is the colour palette. The overriding tone is Easyjet orange. Avanti managing director H P Stadler (“Call me HP – everyone does,” he says) explains that the corporate colour is the outcome of a collaboration with Hamburg identity consultancy Factor, which the C&A group has been working with for some years.

Orange has been carried across all aspects of the store, from the windows, where it is used as a backdrop for Avanti messages in a white font, to the retro-style 1960s kitsch pendant lights that add flair to the cash-and-wrap areas. The windows have been kept simple, but are also a world away from the nearby C&A.

This is a modern building, but it is one that had lain empty for some time and the landlord was keen to find a tenant, according to Stadler, implying that a hard bargain was driven.

Seitz says: “This is our kind of town – not very rich and there’s 14 per cent unemployment.” The prices displayed in the many large windows that wrap around two sides of the building must therefore come as a relief to the local population, where even the local department store, Karstadt, looks as if it has seen better days.

From the outside therefore, the Avanti store, with its bright orange windows and appealingly simple logo, stands as something of a beacon in this self-evidently depressed location. The simplicity of the design also means that, if the roll-out button is hit a few months down the line, the value-engineering part of the process has been more or less done already.

“The base for the roll-out is already there. Normally, whenever you put a new concept in, you bet on creating a trial and then fine-tuning it. We don’t do that in any part of C&A anymore. What you see is a fully developed concept,” says Seitz.

From the shop’s threshold, a simple slate-grey stone walkway with a black suspended ceiling above it featuring embedded spotlights leads the shopper’s gaze into the store interior. The ground floor is about womenswear and the bright orange price signs are everywhere, although they do not feel intrusive. In the middle of the walkway is a low, dark-wood table on wheels with mannequins on it. This feature may be mid-walkway, but the in-house Avanti design team that created the store interior has clearly opted for more space and marginally less merchandise than you would normally find in a value retailer, so there is no sense of overcrowded displays.

The black ceiling and grey floor are confined to the centre of the shop and lead to the central bank of escalators. Elsewhere, the floor is white, but the light is not uniform, with higher and lower levels used to create visual interest. The effect is that the split-level ground floor has a genuine sense of pace and dynamism and puts it in a different category of shopping from its more staid sister along the street.

Behind the escalator there is also a circular, three-floor-high light created from orange and white cloth and suspended from the top floor in a small atrium. Downstairs, menswear has what Seitz refers to as “power tables” – priced fixtures intended to draw the crowds.

Because this is a mono-brand shop, care has been taken to keep things consistent throughout, so although different wallpaper treatments have been applied in different parts of the store, there is no feeling of disparity. There is more womenswear on the first floor, as well as childrenswear and lingerie, the latter featuring a black self-patterned rococo design that bears more than a passing resemblance to what Primark has done on Oxford Street.

And finally there are the cash desks with the queuing system that anybody who has shopped at Matalan, TK Maxx or Primark will be familiar with, but is a first in Germany, according to Stadler.

The question is, has this new format been successful? Seitz is cautiously optimistic. “We wanted the turnover per square metre to be higher than in a C&A store – and it is higher. We also wanted selling prices to be lower and we have done that, too,” he says. “A concept like this doesn’t exist on mainland Europe.”

Seitz says that the value-clothing sector in Germany is worth between 5 billion and 6 billion (3.98 billion and£4.78 billion) and that, when this is extended to the other European countries that C&A trades in (probably excluding Russia and Turkey,) this figure rises to 16 billion (12.75 billion).

Both Stadler and Seitz say that any roll-out of Avanti will be dependent on site availability, because overpaying for store locations is not what this format is about. But, with a wave of poor figures emerging from clothing retailers across the Continent, locations should not, in the short term at least, prove too much of an obstacle.

There will be more Avanti stores and they won’t be long coming. The question is whether, having visited one of these stores, C&A’s traditional customer base will feel overly inclined to frequent a store bearing that name in preference to Avanti. Oh and before you ask – C&A is not planning any kind of return to the UK in the near future, according to Seitz.

Click here to see more images of Avanti in the stores image gallery.