Comment: Rents may be higher, but etailers need physical stores

There is a fluidity about the word ‘shop’ at the moment, which means old certainties have been more or less wiped clean. A shop can be a place you walk into. Equally, it may be an entity encountered solely on a computer monitor or, at a push, a hybrid of the two.

The latter is what is becoming known in some quarters as a ‘digital hub’ - something that acts a little like an internet router at home, spraying out different ways to get up close and personal with a retail brand. Examples of this can be found in Marks & Spencer’s Cheshire Oaks store, the Burberry flagship on Regent Street and the Kiddicare store in Nottingham.

What is interesting about all three of them, apart from the fact that they are all new stores, is that many of the in-store cues have been taken from the virtual, rather than the bricks and mortar, world. This leads perhaps to the conclusion not just that online retailers are providing clues about how to operate for those with physical stores, but also that they may be in need of a store (or maybe even stores) in order to substantiate their brand experience.

This may sound like idle daydreaming on the part of both landlords and those retailers that have large estates where it might be good to farm out a couple of sites. But with Hotel Chocolat as an example of how to move almost seamlessly between the two worlds, the online offline equation appears, in fact, to be a two-way street with operators on both sides viewing those on the opposite side with a mix of fear and some admiration.

The curious thing is why, given the availability of sites, so few etailers have chosen even to dip a virtual toe in the wet physical water. Surely if time is spent creating an individualistic web presence (and the market is as crowded online as on high streets), it is only a small step towards making that virtual character a physical reality.

Much time is expended by sundry pundits speculating on what a store of the future might look like. Perhaps there might be merit in considering instead where that store is likely to be located. Will it be in the ether, within a physical structure or somewhere else? The somewhere else bit seems, on current reckoning, to be the most probable and potentially fruitful outcome. Future success will be a matter of somehow navigating the choppy waters that separate the real and virtual forms of retailing, without compromising the benefits of either.