Nine months after taking over the top job at Hotel Chocolat from entrepreneurial founder Angus Thirlwell, chief executive Lysa Hardy and her team are building something new.
The premium chocolate retailer today throws open the doors to its biggest and most ambitious store to date in Manchester. Retail Week visited the store for a sneak preview with chief executive Lysa Hardy and omnichannel director Frankie Haynes ahead of the grand opening to find out why this store marks such a big step for the brand.
Situated just around the corner from Manchester’s Arndale Centre on the busy shopping arcade of Cross Street in the heart of the city, the 7,000 sq ft flagship is Hotel Chocolat’s more than double the size of its next largest store.
Spread over three floors, Hardy and chief product officer Haynes tell Retail Week that they view the store as essentially a ‘best of’ compilation of the brand’s existing formats across the UK and the US, and have even taken some learnings from its failed Japanese joint venture.
A taste of the future
Just inside of the entrance on the main floor, the ground floor space is dominated by two features: on the right is Hotel Chocolat’s biggest in-store café yet – more than double the size of the next biggest.
It will serve more than 70 covers at full capacity (compared to the next largest in London, which serves 25 covers at capacity), with more seating downstairs and outside, and alongside Velvetiser hot chocolates, will also offer customers a range of baked goods to complement their drinks.
“It’s a bit of a first for Hotel Chocolat in-store,” Hardy says. “We’re trying to create our own versions of the food that is served for the guests at the Rabot Hotel [in St Lucia]. We don’t want it to be too chocolatey,” she says. “More balanced, a nod to the hero ingredient of cacao.
“We’ll be serving both sweet and savoury products throughout the day, covering all of the different day parts – all part of meeting the customer where they are and when they want to experience Hotel Chocolat products”.
On the left-hand side of the entrance is the Wall of Chocolate. It’s a concept first piloted by Hotel Chocolat in Japan in early 2023, but the one in the new Manchester store is on an entirely different scale.
Whereas previous iterations of the wall only carried a select range of products, this purpose-built structure in Manchester houses every single flavour profile the brand has to offer, all in one space.
The retailer is also bringing innovation to the party around its Wall of Chocolate, using screens to allow customers to take a quick ‘Love Match Profile’ quiz, the answers to which will then steer them towards which flavours and combinations best suit their tastes.
“It’s all about really creating an experience for the customers,” Hardy says.
A story to tell
The new experiential features aren’t limited to the cafe or wall.
There’s also a unique-to-the-store drinking chocolate library – one for the brand’s hot chocolate Velvetiser owners out there – a seemingly Willy Wonka-inspired selection of chocolate taps and ice creams and, in a note to the provenance of the brand’s chocolate and its Caribbean origins, a ‘Cacao Cam’ beaming a live feed of sunny St Lucia and its idyllic plantations into Manchester.
Downstairs, alongside more seating, there’s a space for events – which can be hired out for the retailer’s School of Chocolate events and masterclasses – a dedicated click-and-collect area, and an interactive educational element based again on the visitor attractions in St Lucia.
“People think of chocolate as an everyday product that’s easily obtainable,” explains Haynes. “But we want to share the stories of our farmers and try to explain their methods a bit, so that customers can see the process from beginning to end and get an understanding of just how much craftsmanship and work goes into the final product they can buy in-store”.
The final party piece in the new store is one that everyday customers won’t get to experience. Upstairs, the top floor is given over to a training academy for staff – Hotel Chocolat’s second academy, and it’s first one in the north of England, having launched the first academy in Northampton last year.
The store is the perfect synthesis of what a good modern flagship store aspires be: a mixture of personalisation and experiential retailing to draw in customers, combined with physical marketing and brand building, alongside a training hub for staff.
It’s also, as Haynes explains, the amalgamation of all the some 170-odd stores that Hotel Chocolat has opened before with all the learnings, good and bad, that come with them.
But why is all of this goodness in Manchester specifically?
“It was really just too good an opportunity when we found this amount of space in this location,” Haynes says. “We knew that we really wanted a sort of flagship format where we could bring together and test and learn a lot of different formats and layouts we’ve tried at other stores in one space.
“But it was hard to find a space this size say, in London, that we could make the sums work on. We have a great customer community in Manchester already, and this space is in a great location and a great size. It gives us the kind of luxury to experiment with space that we can’t do with most of other stores, and to try out experiences we can’t really offer in our smaller stores”.
Hardy concludes: “We probably couldn’t have afforded to do something like this in London. We think that future-proofing our retail destinations is really important and, with all the different features and experiences we can fit here, we know that we can do that”.
If this is a taste of what Hotel Chocolat’s stores of the future look like, then they will keep even the most discerning of customers coming back for more.
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