In pictures: Retailers set up shop at festivals

Festivals are already big business for retail. Tents, wellies and glitter make-up are all essentials for festival goers and keep the tills ringing for retailers throughout the summer.

However, the thousands that gather at the UK’s many music extravanganzas are also spending big at festivals and now expect more than warm beer and dodgy food from Barry’s burger-van

High street names are cashing in on this with an array of pop-up shops, which get their brand up close and personal with a specific demographic.

Festival retailing is still in its infancy, but with retailers such as Greggs and the Co-op pitching their tents, there is clearly something that must be worthwhile about the exercise.

Of course, they are an effective piece of marketing, both on-site and in the print coverage that may be generated.

It remains a niche area of retail (so far, among the national grocers, only the Co-op has made inroads into the festival arena), but to judge by the reaction to what has been happening this year, this is an area that deserves scrutiny. 

Latitude: The Co-op

Latitude took place this year from 12-15^th July and since its first outing in 2006, it has become a firm favourite on the summer festival circuit.

This, however, is the first year that a national supermarket has set up shop at Latitude and the 6,000 sq ft tent used is bigger than many high street Co-ops.

The shop, offering everything from tobacco (behind closed doors at the checkouts, naturally) to medicine and beer, is unmistakably a tent of the kind that those who enjoy the occasional bit of corporate hospitality or a posh wedding will be familiar with, but it also looks like a Co-op.

This is achieved by graphics trumpeting the retailer’s blue and white colours across the whole of the interior, alongside a bit of Latitude co-branding.

Worth noting too is the fact that the Co-op signed a joint agreement with Live Nation, the Beverly Hills-based events promoter and owner of several festivals, to bring this one to the Latitude masses.

Alasdair Fowle, partnership and events manager at the Co-op, says that the retailer’s initiative is an industry first in the UK and that to date no other supermarket has opted to trade from a temporary store at a large festival.

“Our strategy is about being close to the customer and this is about reaching out to new and younger customers who, traditionally, have been quite hard for us to reach,” he says.

The store is a highly selective vehicle and Fowle notes that there are only 200 SKUs on the shelves and display palettes. This should be compared with a high street Co-op which, at around 2,500 sq ft is roughly 40% of the size of the Latitude structure, but in which shoppers will normally have close to 3,000 products to select from.

Just as important are the logistics and planning that underpin an operation of this kind. Fowle says that with trading hours for the store, which was open for four days, running from 7am to 3am there was just a four-hour window in which to ensure that the store was restocked.

Coping with this meant three shifts of eight hours with 66 staff on site to run the shop.

It also meant a daily delivery of ice of gargantuan proportions and a “20ft chiller out back”.

Then there is the matter of payment. As there were no broadband connections on site, a satellite company was engaged to ensure that the checkouts could deal with card payments, although Fowle relates that cash remained important at the festival.

But what was perhaps the most important element is that this should be a store that would be in keeping with its location.

“It was important that we didn’t just dump a Co-op store into the festival,” says Fowle.

To this end, the Latitude store was different to what will be on view at the Leeds and Reading festivals at the end of August, which are predominantly about “youth” rather the more family-oriented Suffolk gathering.

The obvious question in all of this is whether this was about making money or raising awareness of the brand.

Fowle is coy, mentioning that the project was eight months in the planning and that the Leeds and Reading festivals lie ahead before any kind of assessment can be made about whether to go ahead with something similar in 2019.

Worth noting too is the fact that this year’s festival pop-ups from the Coop follow stores at the Belladrum Tartan Heart festival near Inverness in 2016 and 2017. This is a much smaller affair, but it has clearly provided the impetus for this year.

Foodies Festival: Greggs…or rather, Gregory & Gregory

Away from music festivals, there are events for gourmets and one of these is the Foodies Festival, which took place in May at Syon Park, a short distance from Heathrow.

This was the chosen venue for high street food-to-go merchant Greggs to put its products in front of an audience who might not normally frequent its stores.

It did so under a pseudonym, Gregory & Gregory, and set up a stall purporting to be an upscale purvey of gourmet food.

What followed was well documented in the press that wrote with glee about Greggs’ ‘prank that fooled dedicated food festival visitors, who tasted the food on offer and were then informed of its provenance.

This kind of thing is much less about additional turnover and does look like a PR stunt, but it proved highly effective and in terms of communicating with customers who would give the brand a wide berth, it did the job.

Whether there would be mileage (or whether it would be given festival space) if Greggs turned up as Greggs is of course a moot point, but it does serve to illustrate how new markets can be approached.

V Festival: Very.co.uk

Retailing at festivals is not new. Online department store launched a festival shop at V Festival back in 2012.

For some, festivals are as much about fashion as they are music. Nowhere is that more true than the glamorous (note: you can choose to insert your own adjective here) world of Essex which is why Very.co.uk set-up shop at the Chelmsford festival.

Rather than a store, this was a collection point and was all about showcasing what – at the time – was Very’s market-beating next day delivery service with Collect+.

It also designed a capsule fashion collection as well as festival staples, from tents to suncream to the much-needed welly, which were available to pick up within the hour.

Shoppers picking up orders were also able to prepare for the festival at Very’s ‘Glam Pods’ which included tepee changing rooms, mirrors and hair straighteners.

The store was actually ahead of its time, designed for the mobile shopper to order forgotten items at a time before m-commerce was commonplace.

Of course, this store smacked of PR stunt but it did showcase Very.co.uk’s was about – m-commerce and free next-day delivery.

And there is a very real need for this kind of service at festivals – a place for shoppers to pick up forgotten items, delivered in super quick time.