Superdry: Regent Street flagship

Regent Street is an expensive place to set up shop and once a retailer’s signed on the dotted line the chances are that the process of fitting out and opening a store will be rapid – time really is money. There, are of course, exceptions and the hoarding that shouts the imminent arrival of Hollister in place of National Geographic (which recently decamped to its more modest home on Kensington High Street) is a case in point and has been there a while. Equally, just along the street, the towering hoarding informing shoppers that Burberry will open its biggest store to date is likely to be around for a little longer. Even the Ferrari store, seemed to take an age to get off the grid. But all of these are unusual and can probably afford to take their time as they are all massively well-funded global brands.

Grand gestures

To an extent the same might be said of Superdry, which is well known in this country and has a London Stock Exchange listing, but which is also increasingly branching out internationally. And perhaps with this in mind, at the end of last year it also opened a flagship on Regent Street.

There can be a certain amount of corporate hubris about putting a store on London’s grandest shopping thoroughfare and it is certainly a statement of intent. It costs to get the site and there will be a requirement to make this better than any of your other stores – which will inevitably add to the price. An undertaking of this kind is therefore not to be entered into lightly. Indeed, there have been a few that have made the journey to Regent Street only to board the number 12 bus and head off elsewhere in fairly short order (Nokia and National Geographic stand as prime examples).

Superdry has done things differently, however. The three-floor store that it has taken possession of traded from just the ground floor when it opened at the end of December, with the first and basement levels having only welcomed shoppers this month. This is probably a reflection of the money involved and given the complexity of what is being done in this store, the view seems to have been taken that it makes sense to take money from a single floor, rather than waiting for three floors to be ready to trade. A fourth level will finally open in the late spring.

And the first thing that you see when you enter this store is that you can’t see – or at least not too well. This is a ‘dark’ store, of the kind that Universal Nude has espoused in its standalone shops and which marks out the Abercrombie & Fitch store around the corner in Savile Row as being both different and for the well-heeled.

In Superdry, the entrance to the shop is guarded by a museum-style vitrine housing mannequins. This is dimly lit, with the focus on the stock. Walk around this and suddenly it’s a matter of relatively loud music and the appearance of many rooms and alcoves, all of which are exercises in light and shadow, with large, theatrical spotlights making in-store navigation a question of exploration. And like Abercrombie & Fitch, the open-fronted perimeter wardrobes are lit by small LED lights set into the shelf surrounds – the increasingly familiar ploy of lighting the stock rather than the shop.

If you look carefully and are familiar with Superdry stores elsewhere, you may recognise many of the mid-floor fixtures as they’re the same as are used in other branches. The difference in this store are the floor-to-ceiling glass cases, like the one at the entrance – used to demarcate the different merchandise areas.

The shoe shop, towards the back of the ground floor is also noteworthy, as this is the one area that is more conventionally lit – making it an inevitable draw from other parts of the store.

Super store features

The real showstoppers, however, have to be the plain wood cash desks with the ground floor even featuring a long video screen that backs the wall behind it. As the ground floor counter is dark and, at times, the assistants look more like blacked out profiles when they stand in front of this, it’s hard not to be drawn moth-like towards paying.

The atrium houses an industrial-looking staircase that draws attention to the other levels thanks to the mannequins set into recesses in the walls behind the staircase. Each of these has a white fluorescent tube next to it. It’s a little like looking at a row of Superdry-clad cyborgs waiting for someone to press the activate button.

When the activate button is pressed on the top floor later this year, this will be one of the darker and more unusual shops on Regent Street. It will also have the considerable merit of being one of the most affordable destinations on the strip.