Tesco flies solo with clothing standalone

You don’t have to go far to catch a little F&F action. Tesco’s clothing brand is available at most of its larger branches in the UK and it’s simply a matter of patrolling the aisles and making a choice. If, on the other hand, you wish to visit a standalone F&F store, you’ll have to travel a little further: to Prague.

This is where the supermarket has opted to open its first store of the kind and unlike most big Tesco stores it is in the heart of the baroque city. It is in fact housed in the Palladium, a former military barracks that has had a modern annex added to it and now functions as a large and distinctly premium shopping centre where about 200 stores and restaurants ply their trade.

The 3,800 sq ft F&F store is on the first floor, not, you might think, the best position to open a fashion store. Yet long before you get to it, you are aware of its presence. Enter the centre through the main doors, look up, and you are staring at the internal back wall of F&F. You can’t miss it either, as the name is emblazoned across the glassfibre screen in white neon.

Now head into the mall proper and the many overhead monitors seem to carry perpetual adverts for F&F. Even if you wanted to ignore this new arrival at the Palladium it would be difficult. And arriving at the store threshold, it looks as if this is a store that was made for the centre.

Adam Shilton, a designer at consultancy Four IV, which worked on the project, says this wasn’t the case: “Four IV got the brief about a year ago and at the time, there wasn’t a space for the concept. This meant the design had to be flexible and capable of being taken to any location.”

The solution that was agreed uses the F&F name as the starting point, according to Chris Dewar-Dixon, creative director and Four IV founder: “The whole idea was to bring the brand to life in a three dimensional form.” Practically, this means that everything in the store, whether it’s the merchandise table in the shape of an ampersand, or the denim display units with an F at each end, has some sort of reference to the F&F name.

Long before you get to examine this, however, you will have seen the massive F&F logo that dominates the whole of the front window. Formed once more of two outsize white neon Fs, it is the ampersand that is the clever bit. Rather than going for more neon, a version of an ampersand has been created using light oak strips fastened to a glass screen that give the impression of the symbol as a photographic negative.

Next to this a trio of mannequins, two female and one male, are on a revolving plinth and just inside the entrance there’s a large internally lit niche with three more mannequins. Above all of this, a circle of short, vertically mounted white neon lights serves as an additional feature for the area. The whole space, windows and entrance atrium, occupies about 780 sq ft and Shilton says that the aim was to foster the sense of a catwalk and to give the store an initial glamour.

It is also, in part, a response to the fact that as the store straddles the transition between the older military barracks and the newer centre, it is on several levels and therefore something needed to be done to overcome this mild disconnect. Progressing further into the store, two things are obvious: theatre-style spotlights are everywhere (although doctored so that they don’t emit high levels of heat) and there is uniformity about the black mid-shop and perimeter equipment that is found around the store. In broad terms, the store divides one third menswear and two-thirds womenswear, but the two parts are linked by “dark gunmetal rails that snake through the space as a continuous form,” as Dewar-Dixon puts it.

The perimeter is demarcated by this rail that acts as a form of dado rail beneath which open-fronted wardrobes are used to display the merchandise in lifestyle fashion. The wardrobes are in pairs, linked by faux hinges intended to give the appearance of doors that have just been opened. And, depending on which part of the store you are in, the interior of each of the wardrobes is colour coded according to the kind of merchandise that is being displayed. It’s simple stuff, but effective, so for men the interiors are black, for jewellery there are flecked fibreglass backs and for the lingerie department there are champagne-coloured backs, for example. The colours provide the cue for elements of the mid-floor equipment, so as well as champagne wardrobes, the lingerie department also features metal tables using the same colour.

And all of this was prototyped and manufactured off-site, in Market Harborough, by Quantum 4 and then shipped across the to the Czech Republic. In the normal run of things, this might sound like an expensive way of going about it, but bearing in mind that this is a pilot store, Tesco was able to exercise greater developmental control by keeping things close to home.

As for the store, if you didn’t know, you’d have absolutely no idea that you were shopping a Tesco offshoot.

“I think that the owners of the Palladium were worried that we might take clothing from a hypermarket and put it into a shopping centre. Throughout the project we were constantly trying to convince ourselves that this was not a hypermarket,” says Shilton.

The only clue that things are not what they might at first appear is the prices. Palladium may be an upscale development, but the prices in F&F are where you’d expect them to be if you visited one of the retailer’s supermarkets in this country. Other than that, the high-gloss finish, the New York photo-shoot graphics that are scattered around the store and the degree of fashion in the clothing ranges, all point towards a store that can mix it with its more expensive rivals.

The obvious question is whether we are about to see a flood of F&F standalones in the UK at some point in the near future. The answer seems to be no, as Tesco is intent on developing the format for central Europe and there are apparently no plans in place to bring it to the UK. That said, if you want to see a store that takes you away from the world of supermarket clothing offers and transports you instead to a quasi-branded environment, then this is the place to visit. And owing to the modular nature of this store fit-out, if it proves successful, it’s unlikely to be long before this one strays further afield.