Store gallery: Superdrug's beauty superstore, Fosse Park, Leicester

The number of retailers to post pre-tax profits up by more than 40% and like-for-like sales up by nearly 8% this year is very, very limited.

Yet these are the numbers unveiled by Superdrug last week when it notified the market of a “strong year”.

Buried in the trading information was a small piece about an out-of-town Superdrug format that has been up and running since the beginning of the year in Leicester’s Fosse Park and Bournemouth’s Castlepoint, both retail parks.

A trip to either of these illustrates that this retailer understands its shoppers and seems increasingly adept at giving them what they want.

Fosse Park is about four miles from Leicester city centre and isn’t far from the M1 sliproad, As such, it is Motown. The overwhelming majority of shoppers heading for this one do so by car (and woe betide anybody who tries to take a bus or hail a taxi from the scheme – the transport infrastructure for those without their own wheels is rudimentary).

Having arrived at Superdrug (housed in a former Gap, as is the JD Sports next door) the first thing visitors will notice is that while this has a pleasantly glazed frontage, it doesn’t look so very different from many other Superdrug stores.

Step inside, however, and the vista is of a thin, deep unit with relatively few frills.

It is one of the seeming paradoxes about this form of retailing that much of it is posited on making people look and feel better and yet the store design is pared back – almost beauty at a discount.

Focus on fragrance

Three main aisles run all the way to the back and the attention grabbers are arranged along the left- and right-hand perimeters, with cosmetics one side and fragrance the other.

Apart from the obvious point that this is where the money is, in the case of the fragrance offer, a manned counter stretches to roughly the halfway point. 

A currently unused mezzanine brings the ceiling height down towards the back of the shop. This means that both the fragrance and cosmetics offers have a fair amount of empty white wall space above them.

An attempt has been made at dealing with this by putting signage ‘Make-up’ and ‘Fragrance’ above the units.

This does look a little like a statement of the obvious, given the power of the displays themselves, but perhaps the thinking was ‘wayfinding’; the mid-shop units are sufficiently high to make working out what’s in the aisle beyond the one you are in a little tricky.

There is no mistaking where payment is made, however. Directly beneath the mezzanine on the right-hand side is a hot pink back wall and the direction ‘Pay here’.

In-store treatments

Beyond this is the Beauty Studio, arranged along the back wall and consisting of stations where shoppers can book threading, pedicures and lash extensions, among other treatments.

This area is set to migrate up to the mezzanine level ‘soon’,  although when is not specified.

“It is the product that does the talking, as it would be hard to describe the store design itself as anything more than utilitarian”

This is a no-nonsense approach to the business of shifting goods and salon services.

It is the product that does the talking, as it would be hard to describe the store design itself as anything more than utilitarian.

It is a strong offer however and certainly stands up to anything that the nearby Boots has on show or, on the fragrance front, The Perfume Shop kiosk that sits within the Fosse Park food court.

Retail parks are practical places and this is a practical response to this environment. It was also busy relatively early on a Thursday morning.