Globus: Switzerland’s branded houses

This is a story about keeping ahead of your competitors. It’s about understanding who the customer is and responding in kind. It is not about price and neither is it overly concerned with heavy promotional activity. And it’s in Switzerland.

Globus is the department store arm of Migros, Switzerland’s largest retail group, and in the western city of Bern it has refurbished one of its stores and opened another in a shopping centre on the periphery of this metropolis, with a population of 200,000. Both stores carry very similar offers, but each has been carefully targeted to serve a particular, and to some extent different, customer.

But first, a little about Bern. Around an hour’s drive from either Zurich or Basel, Bern may be the Swiss capital and a Unesco world heritage city but it’s not exactly the most visited place in central Switzerland, in spite of its many attractions. However, in common with most of the country’s larger cities, it has a distinctly affluent feel, even in these credit-crunched times.

Which is perhaps why Globus, which has 13 department stores spread predominantly across Switzerland’s German-speaking areas, has decided it is a suitable location in which to have two branches.

The city centre store opened in 1965, but emerged from a close to two-year refurbishment programme on October 30 last year. The revamp of the 75,350 sq ft (7,000 sq m), five-floor emporium cost more than CHF27m (£16.4m) and the outcome is a shop that may be in Bern’s historic centre but which has a distinctly contemporary feel when you step though its doors.

The refurb has given the store an extra floor of women’s fashion, and two homewares levels that make good architectural use of a former escalator well. There’s also a food hall, in the basement, of the kind that many UK shoppers will never get to see.

Globus in central Bern also benefits from consistency. Step into most department stores and if there are more than a couple of floors, it is highly probable that each will look and feel different – in terms of design and probably use of materials. This is frequently deliberate and is intended to provide variety. In the central Bern store, although the offer is different on each level, the floor is covered in the same dark tiles throughout, the ceiling is the same height and the mid-shop and perimeter fixturings are the same – generally fashioned from a mix of blackened sheet steel and dark wood.

Globus head of communications Juerg Welti (in a former life he used to head the stores and their refurbishmentsays that this unity is not for reasons of cost-efficiency – although this has a part to play – but principally so that shoppers will feel “comfortable”.

Indeed, comfort seems to play a leading role in this redesigned shop. It is a common complaint that many central European department stores have floors that are not only very large but which also feel it, because mid-shop equipment heights are low and there are no freestanding walls.

Welti points out that even on the ground floor, with its large beauty and accessories area, there is little sense of the wide open spaces. “We have tried to create rooms in this store,” he says. Welti adds that smaller rooms are a feature of Bernese architecture and the interior landscape of this store is an attempt to create a similar feeling.

Now ride the escalator into the basement and while there may be a lot of things that you would want to eat, it is the displays that really catch the eye. From the fish counter, with a massive moonfish, to the tea display, which would shame the great majority of UK cuppa specialists, this is food porn.

It is also worth noting the highly developed own-brand offer. Welti is at pains to point out that Globus is about being a “branded house” rather than a house of brands and this means that a walk around the jams and preserves area is an object lesson in making own-buy more desirable than the branded alternative.

All of the products in this area boast a faux-handwritten label, developed in the late 1960s, imparting a sense of bespoke merchandise. The device is used across other categories, with goodies such as sweet truffles all getting the handwritten treatment.

All of which might leave the uninformed wondering why Globus decided that opening in the Westside shopping centre (on Bern’s fringes and heading towards the French-speaking part of Switzerland) might be a good idea. With an offer at this level, surely there wouldn’t be sufficient customers to support both?

Welti says that the Westside store’s location, a 10-minute local train ride from the city’s central station, is planned to provide an alternative for shoppers from nearby French-speaking towns such as Fribourg. For people from this area, German-speaking Bern might not be a natural shopping destination, but Westside is largeenough and boasts sufficient numbers of new retailers to act as a draw, according to Welti.

There is also the matter of the centre’s architecture. Anybody on nodding terms with modern architecture will know the name Daniel Libeskind and Westside is one of his designs. From the man who won the prize to design a memorial for New York’s Twin Towers and created a museum-cum-memorial to the Holocaust in Berlin, it is perhaps surprising that he has opted to create a shopping centre.

What is less startling is that having done so, the result is extraordinary. The centre opened at the end of last year and the Globus store is at its heart. With multiple levels, sharp-edged triangular holes in the floor that allow shoppers to peer upwards or downwards, and very high levels of natural daylight, this is not the kind of thing that most of us expect from a trip to the mall.

It also means that Globus had a job on its hands when carving up the three-floor space that Libeskind designed for Metro, which is Westside’s landlord and developer. The two lower floors run in the same direction, but the top level is set at right angles to them, immediately posing problems in terms of circulation and merchandising. There is also the matter of the store windows, which are not set at 90 degrees to the floor but which slant with the bottom of the glass being closer to shoppers than the top. From a practical perspective this means that window displays cannot run up to the glass-line, but have to be set back from it.

Step inside and, remarkably, Globus has managed to create an ambience that is similar in feel to the central Bern branch. The difference is the ceiling. Owing to fire regulations, areas of the blacked-out ceiling void on each level had to be left uncovered. Welti says that a virtue was made out of necessity, so in place of a solid ceiling, a white asymmetric lattice has been strung across the void, creating a very modern feel, reflecting the public areas of the mall’s interior.

Otherwise, all of the departments found in the central Bern store are here, just organised differently. There is also a menswear department on the ground floor – something that has been hived off to a separate Herren Globus store, adjacent to the refurbished central Bern branch.

The food hall is smaller, with less emphasis on fresh foods, but it is the wine department that merits special attention. This has its own collectors’ wine room and if Chateau Petrus 1982 is your thing, about £4,000 a bottle apparently, then this is where you can buy it.

Globus has succeeded in creating two different shopping environments where both are instantly recognisable as coming from the same generous mould. It’s a trick that most UK department store retailers have yet to learn and one that goes a long way in explaining how a branded house works. Welti says the economic turbulence that has hit the UK has yet to really take its toll on Switzerland. When it does, Globus looks better placed than most to weather the storm.