Store gallery: Primark raises the value stakes in Düsseldorf

When the strength of its economy is considered and the general level of affluence across its population is taken into account, Germany’s focus on value retailing is perhaps a surprise. Yet this is the European spiritual home of low cost and a quick walk around Düsseldorf’s Schadowstrasse, the city’s main mass-market shopping street, serves to confirm that.

There’s a large branch of French fashion discounter Pimkie, a low-cost food-to-go offer from Rewe and, taking centre stage, a multi-floor branch of C&A - the value fashion retailer that graced UK high streets until 2000. It is hardly surprising that the latter occupies such a prominent position, given that a large proportion of the retailer’s buying function for the whole of Europe is based in the city.

Yet C&A’s once seemingly unassailable position at the head of Düsseldorf’s value fashion pantheon is now under threat, perhaps even siege, with the arrival of a new retailer - Primark.

Open since just before Christmas, the 61,000 sq ft, four-floor store is crowded with shoppers and provides a stark contrast to the wide open spaces that characterise the interior of the C&A on a Monday in early January.

There is considerable merit in setting the two propositions side by side when wondering why Primark is as busy as it is. The C&A store has had a recent revamp and its exterior features an LED-studded logo, a discrete entrance for its Clockhouse fashion offer and large high-resolution screens featuring fashion content across its frontage.

Primark also has an LED-lit logo and a high-resolution screen directly above the entrance, but that is probably as far as the similarities go. Although both stores broadly target a similar demographic, the differences could hardly be greater as far as the look and feel of each is concerned.

The C&A store consists, for the most part, of a series of white boxes with the occasional piece of colour injected in the form of wood-look denim shop-in-shops. The store equipment is a mix of white and Perspex, and signage is provided by white neon tubes set against the Perspex. There is a general sense of uniformity and perhaps over-spacing about each floor, but this is a workmanlike fashion(able) environment.

Industrial fit-out

Now contrast this with the more densely merchandised vista that greets the shopper entering the Primark store.

The sense that this is a shop with a lot to look at is almost immediately apparent and the lighting and choice of in-store colour serve to reinforce this.

Director of store development Peter Franks says: “We’ve moved the lighting on in this store. It’s about a generally lower level of ambient lighting and more spotlighting.”

From the outset other changes are visible. “There are polished concrete floors. We always try to play to the local nature of a location and the floors reference the high-fashion nature of Düsseldorf, but with a nod towards its industrial past,” says Franks.

The other element that sets this shop apart from the 10 other branches at present trading in Germany is the use of punched metal screens in the windows and more generally around the store.

In the windows, these are on overhead rails, allowing them to be moved around and for greater or lesser amounts of daylight to penetrate the interior. The fact that they are punched metal and are used around the interior perimeter as well helps to promote the industrial feel.

Standing at the main door and looking across the floor, all of it womenswear, the seasoned observer may also note the circular pillars clad in porous concrete. A number of these have lightboxes featuring fashion graphics that curve around them, assisting in the creation of a fashion interior. And to the right there is the ‘trend room’, a semi-discrete space where the “most fashionable” items are given floor space, according to Wolfgang Krogmann, director-general, northern Europe. The area is bounded by mannequins and demarcated by a series of vertical cables and has different mid-shop equipment from the rest of the floor.

Elsewhere, there are digital in-store navigational screens, which offer pictorial maps of the store as well as fashion videos.

At the back of the ground floor there is a corridor-like area where the tills are located. Franks says that taking this away from the main part of the floor allows the fashion to be more prominent.

This does not, however, mean that the cash-taking space is utilitarian. A finish has been applied to the walls that makes them also appear to be concrete, coloured in the same turquoise used for Primark’s fascia.

Before leaving this floor, note should also be made of the steel and glass lift. “We’d normally make the glass aqua colour, but in this store we wanted to leave it clear so that the industrial feel could be continued,” says Franks.

New ‘denim kitchen’

Head up one floor and there’s more womenswear, but this time the new feature is the denim shop. “We’ve decided to call this the ‘denim kitchen’,” says Franks, pointing at a backdrop of white tiling on the walls.

The denim kitchen also features bright orange-coloured metal tracking that runs from floor to ceiling and pairs of jean-clad legs suspended from the ceiling, which act as visual markers for the department.

The top floor, home to menswear, has a much lower ceiling compared with the other levels at just 2.5m, but this does not seem to have militated against it ticking over on the day of visiting.

And so to the basement, where the bulk of the accessories offer is and where the feature that is new and most attention-grabbing is the shoe shop.

Franks says that the high walls and signage give the category a presence that has not always been apparent previously. “One of the call-outs from our customers is to tell us where the product is,” he says.

In this store the mid-shop equipment on which the shoes are displayed has been angled at 45 degrees. This allows views to the back wall, something that is not possible when the gondolas are organised in lines at right angles to the rest of the floor.

This is a value fashion department store and one where there is something different in terms of equipment and displays at almost every turn. Primark continues to work with London design consultancy Dalziel + Pow on its interiors - a meeting takes place at least once a week, every week - and Düsseldorf is the latest outcome of this arrangement.

Meanwhile, C&A would do well to look to its laurels, given the somewhat static uniformity of what has been done in its store in this location.

The value fashion war in Germany appears to be creeping up a notch or two.