Store gallery: The Funky Fairy opens pop-up store

Customisation is something that crops up in retail sporadically, usually in an attempt to justify charging a premium for a product. This is particularly the case in the world of denim. Here many of the base products are more or less the same and therefore making a pair of jeans unique to the owner imbues them with a quality that money can buy but which is not generally available.

A category where customisation is rarely encountered, however, is babywear and accessories and on the face of it you’d have to ask why bother – the end user isn’t really going to care one way or the other about what’s written on his or her bib. But that is not the point. Customised bibs and baby gifts are all about the parents. This is about making them feel that their offspring are not only incredibly advanced and talented, and naturally that neurosurgery is a potential future career option, but that they already have the accoutrements that set them apart from the herd.

That, at its most essential, is the raison d’être of The Funky Fairy, a pop-up store in Westfield Stratford City. This is, in fact, the first standalone store for the fledgling brand, which has operated from a retail merchandising unit (RMU) in Bluewater for two years and has now made the leap into retailing from a shop that opened at the beginning of this month. Owner Vicki Stewart says this is an act of faith and that the cost of setting up in Westfield’s Stratford mall has been very high and that it’s a matter of “fingers crossed”.

Maybe so, but at first glance, the shop has plenty of people having a look around and some are buying. The reason for this is simple. Stewart and Kent-based design consultancy Creative Elements have taken a fairly nondescript unit and made more of it than would normally be the case for a pop-up. And curiously, it is the unit’s anonymity that is perhaps its strength. This is the original white box, as long as it is wide, meaning that tricks do not have to be played with the internal geography before transforming the space. And like all of the stores in Stratford, it features a floor-to-ceiling glazed frontage, which makes seeing and understanding the offer, well, child’s play.

Inside, the route to opening has been straightforward – run with the white interior, add white perimeter displays in a series of medium-height slatwalls and pigeonholes, and then make a feature out of the cash desk. For the rest, as most of the stock is brightly coloured, it’s a case of letting the products do the talking.

Unlike most stores, the focus in many ways is the cash desk. Styled to look like a Wendy house that has its own picket fence, this is not a run-of-the-mill cash-taking area. The Wendy house area is where Stewart is found on the day of our visit and she’s busy customising some baby bibs, courtesy of a couple of overlocking machines. This is the heart of the operation and much of the stock on display is the outcome of Stewart and her machines at work within the Wendy house.

At the front of house, the shop works as an advertisement for the benefits of customising stock, with a washing line display across the upper glassline carrying babies’ bibs bearing personalised messages. These range from ‘Sorry ladies my Daddy is taken’ and ‘Spit happens’, to the distinctly minority interest ‘Me & my grandad support Millwall’.

Outsized decals have been applied to the glass with the eponymous fairy taking centre-stage alongside a galaxy of nursery-style stars. None of this is complex, but the thought that has gone into this interior and its visual merchandising commands a smile.

The store also consists of open-sided boxes and wooden pallets, all painted white, and carrying a mix of soft toys and Trunkis – wheeled mini-suitcases with insect characteristics. Again, complexity is not the point, but that it has appeal.

It’s a big leap from operating an RMU to running a shop and to do so in an arena as red in tooth and claw as Westfield’s Stratford centre is a major undertaking. That said, with the sheer number of people that are forecast to pass through the centre on the way to the forthcoming Games, now is probably the best moment to be a trader in this location and may go some way towards explaining the “extremely expensive” short-term lease about which Stewart seems a mite rueful. On this basis, The Funky Fairy looks like a positive bit of opportunism and is well executed with a proposition that is not mirrored by any other trader in the scheme.

It’s hard not to wonder at the wisdom of closing the car parks from June 18 until after the Paralympic Games, however. How are shoppers going to get their shopping home? By train, bus, tube or high-speed rail link is the probable, but somewhat unsatisfactory answer.