Store gallery: Burberry Regent Street - a vision of luxury retail

Things have, apparently, been tough at Burberry recently with retail sales for the 10 weeks to September 8 showing an increase of “just” (as one broker puts it) 6% and a “deceleration” in the latter part of the period.

If this were not the luxury sector, the sound of champagne corks popping and dancing in the streets might be the accompanying mood music to this kind of performance.

This is luxury, however, and a truly global business such as Burberry, which like others in the sector has relied on resilient and acquisitive Chinese consumers to ensure forward movement, is in some measure a barometer of confidence. An assumption seems to have taken place that is similar to the ‘upwards only’ rental tendencies of the retail property sector – luxury can only grow and grow. Any kind of slowdown is therefore likely to provide the Cassandras with much to talk about and on the day that Burberry made its unscheduled announcement, the shares took a very substantial hit.

And in the week in which the brand revealed that growth has slowed or even stopped (it was not made clear which), it “officially” opened its global flagship on Regent Street (unofficially, it staged a “soft” opening on the evening of September 3).

Mainstream desire

At 44,000 sq ft in total and with a selling area of 27,000 sq ft, this is a big store, but for a luxury player it is enormous and ranks alongside Louis Vuitton Maison on Bond Street in terms of importance to the brand. Unlike that brand, however, this flagship is on home territory. The choice of Regent Street, rather than Bond Street, for Burberry’s number one store is therefore a reflection not just of site availability, but of a desire for this to be a mainstream store, in spite of its heavy luxury credentials.

It is also a digital store – an aspect that is a major element of differentiation for Burberry. That said, standing on the east side of Regent Street, across the road from the store (the only way in which you can really get a full view of this structure) this is an emporium from the old school of grandness.

The Burberry logo is actually quite low-key, but there is little mistaking that the former Habitat shop has been turned into a destination in a way that it wasn’t in its prior incarnation. It is also a bigger store than when it was a purveyor of home furnishings, wrapping around the corner and running into Vigo Street. The real action for the onlooker, however, is on Regent Street.

Top-end palette

For the opening, the principal store windows feature, somewhat predictably, a series of trench-coated mannequins with long shafts of geometric glass rising and falling mechanically around them. Colours are muted and the window surrounds are bronze- coloured, because they are bronze – a top-end palette of materials has been used throughout.

The Vigo Street windows are home to accessories displays and provide the first glimpse of a visual merchandising trope that is repeated across the store – empty shelves. More accurately, the top shelf of a three-tiered arrangement is almost empty, having just one bag on display. The reason for this is simple – the shelf beneath it has two bags and the one under this three. It’s a pyramidal affair.

Back to the front of the store, however, and in through the main doors. These are, in fact, the doors that were originally intended to form part of the building’s fascia but were never built owing to both complexity and expense – they are, once more, made of bronze. Much of this interior is about restoration – carrying on the work that was started by Habitat. And the doors are a case in point. Burberry has taken the original 1920s drawings for them and had them manufactured – which does stand as a mark of intent about preserving the building’s architectural integrity.

Inside, there is a white marble lobby that leads to steps that take the visitor down into the store’s main event: the atrium. This was in place when Habitat was the tenant, but the furniture retailer had put a free-standing dark wood structure, which did not touch the perimeter at any point, into the centre of the space, so it was relatively difficult to see what the whole area looked like.

Burberry, by contrast, has stripped away the mid-shop superstructure, leaving an unobstructed view up to the listed, stained-glass dome. The whole area is circular and has a galleried mezzanine that allows shoppers to peer down at the mid-shop panorama when they make it up to the first floor. The chances are good, however, that this may go unremarked as the real attention-grabber is a screen.

Digital events

In the normal run of things, a screen might be interesting, but it would not be the most diverting element of a luxury interior. This screen, however, is the world’s largest inside a store (it is 6.9m high and about the same wide), according to Burberry and, as well as carrying promotional content from the brand, it will also be put to use as the centrepiece for streamed sessions from Burberry runway shows.

It will also be part of a daily store-wide digital event. Look around and it quickly becomes apparent that there are much smaller screens around the perimeter, on all floors. And at specific times during a day, plans are in place to synchronise content across all screens, according to a spokeswoman.

Note should also be made of the marble floor in the atrium, which has a pattern set into it that mirrors the stained glass overhead – this is an interior where detail really matters.

For the most part, the atrium could easily be described as ‘merchandise light’ as one of the payoffs for being a luxury shopper, even somewhere where space is at an extreme premium like Regent Street, is that large amounts of free space form part of the equation. That said, there are a few free-standing glass and metal display units, which contain accessories and outerwear, as well as a smattering of other product categories around the perimeter.

For those with the means to buy something, the plush fitting rooms, behind the big screen, have deep-pile carpets underfoot and whole forests appear to have been cut down to create each cubicle’s “double-fumed” German oak walls.

Upstairs, accessed by the sweeping staircases either side of the screen, the area that overlooks the atrium is a gallery featuring, for the moment, one-off Burberry trench coats, which are not for sale. As on the lower floor, these are backed by more screens and lead, at the far end, to a stepped series of displays with yet more coats and comfortable chairs and sofas.

Furniture plays a major part across the store – the idea being that this is not a grab-and-go environment and that time and comfort are required to put shoppers in the mood.

At this point, you might be tempted to imagine that you have seen most of “the first physical manifestation of Burberry World”, as the spokeswoman puts it. This proves incorrect, as there are four floors that are set off from the main atrium, which provide the bulk of the men’s and women’s offers, as well as offering some of the best views of Regent Street available.

Virtual reality

The real surprise, however, comes when you select a garment to try on in one of the fitting rooms on these floors. Each item has an RFID tag that triggers content about it to appear on the mirrors in the fitting room as the shopper enters. This is digital value-add and is, of course, a form of augmented reality, but it is done much better than almost anywhere else where a similar idea has been implemented.

Finally, mention should be made of the ‘Lantern Room’ – an accessories space with a glass lanterned ceiling and a marble geometrically patterned floor of the kind more usually seen in grand Mayfair mansions.

This is a major investment and one that will inevitably prove a major pull for the coach-loads of Chinese, Japanese and Russian tourists visiting Regent Street. Burberry has created a destination on a street where destinations are the norm, but given its statement last week that costs are being closely controlled, it seems reasonable to assume that this will be as good as it gets, for a while at least.