There’s some corner of a foreign field that is forever...Clarks

Last week, Clarks quietly opened a new look store, in Hamburg. Nothing terribly remarkable about that you might think, except that Clarks is a UK-based retailer with plenty of branches in this country. You would have thought therefore that it might make sense to trial something a little closer to home - home, in this instance, being Street in Somerset.

There will certainly be reasons for Clarks having chosen Hamburg to trial a format that it is rumoured will see nine stores, including a handful in the UK, receiving the new treatment. But you do have to wonder why a site roughly 700 miles by road from head office was selected for the pilot.

Clarks is certainly a cross-border brand and the decision will have kept its international division busy, working with London design consultancy Four IV, but why not test something out in, say, Bristol. This would surely be a more cost-effective manner of assessing the efficacy of a new store design, if only in terms of the travel miles and accommodation needs (there would be none of the latter) of those setting out from Street.

The word from Clarks’ press office is that new designs “concepts” are generally “tested in our head office and amongst various stakeholders before being trialled in stores and amended as needed. When the new design is agreed, it is trialled again to confirm its suitability across the different types and sizes of Clark shops that exist around the world.”

All well and good and if you are a large operation with outlets in many countries, then it is easy to understand that conditions may vary from country to country. But this still does not make conducting a test in Hamburg any cheaper. When this format does arrive in the UK, and this will apparently be within the next six months, it will be interesting to see whether shoppers give it the thumbs up. If they do, all well and good, but creating a modular, portable format would still have been cheaper if it had been done closer to home.

And consider this, even a giant like Minnesota-based general retailer Target, tests store in its backyard. Last week it announced that it had remodelled 25 stores in the “Twin Cities” metro area (Minneapolis-St Pauls) - a stone’s thrown from head office.

So back to Clarks then. Why Hamburg? Sometimes you are left wondering - maybe there is a good reason, but it’s quite hard to fathom.