Uniqlo: Colour it in

In August, Uniqlo UK quietly ceased to exist and became subsumed within the greater whole that is the freshly formed Uniqlo Europe.

Practically, this has involved the merging of the French and UK operations and according to Takao Kuwahara, the newly installed chief executive of Uniqlo Europe, Germany is now in the Japanese retailer’s sights, although locations remain unconfirmed.

For now, one of the outcomes of all of this is that the Regent Street store has undergone a root-and-branch refurbishment. The decision to do this was taken sometime ahead of the August change and the store only reopened on the 13th of this month following a three-month closure.

Closing a store for this length of time is unusual in a climate where even more than normal time is money and there has to be a pressing reason for this to happen. In the case of Uniqlo’s Regent Street store, this is the oldest central London store in the UK portfolio and it is therefore reasonable to suppose that a revamp was overdue.

What has been done, however, is rather more than a lick of paint and a few new fixtures. The basement has been extended, providing a new home for the final +J by Jil Sander collection (“time to move things on”, according to a spokeswoman) and an additional trading floor has been added.

In total, this takes the store to 13,500 sq ft, which still makes it smaller than the Oxford Street flagship, but it does mean that this is a now a large Uniqlo store.

The refurb has also meant bringing the store into line with what’s being done in Paris, New York and Tokyo. It is worth noting at this point that there are more than 200 Uniqlo stores in the greater Tokyo area, according to Kuwahara, who is quick to deny that something of the kind is on the cards for London, but who does say that the retailer still sees substantial opportunity in the capital.

“This store represents the latest thinking for Uniqlo and is about communicating what Uniqlo is about,”

he says. This may well be so, but it does, with a number of additional features, look remarkably like what you’ll see if you walk the half mile or so to the Oxford Street store.

However, this may well be the point.  Uniqlo Europe chief operating officer Hidenobu Sanada says that the number of styles has been reduced from around 600, in a large branch, to 400 for Regent Street. “We have the styles for which Uniqlo is known,” he says, meaning presumably that what is on view might be regarded as the core collection with the Jil Sander range tacked on.

This, apparently, is the new global look for Uniqlo and standing outside the shop, it is both attractive and fairly quickly capable of replication.

Coloured mannequins fill the window and peering inside the door the first thing that you encounter are displays of budget denim (under a tenner). So far, so Uniqlo.

The ‘happy machine’

In the middle of all of this is the first surprise: the ‘happy machine’. While this may sound a little as if the ‘orgasmatron’ from Woody Allen’s Sleeper has somehow found its way into the middle of a Uniqlo store, it turns out, disappointingly to be nothing of the kind.

Instead, shoppers are confronted by a structure mounted on a low, varnished wooden plinth. It is, principally, a transparent column in the shape of a cross. Each arm of the cross is divided into three, vertically, with a different style in each section. What marks out what the ‘happy machine’ offers is the astonishingly low price of the garments that it contains. Different styles are timed to be dispensed at various points throughout the day – providing a reason for multiple visits, if you happen to be close to the store during opening hours.

As a tempter, a piece of retail design and a fresh idea, this is pretty good and it has the additional merit of potentially getting people talking about Uniqlo, which should also be the objective of any promotional vehicle.

Business as usual

Walk deeper into the store and it is business as usual, albeit engagingly presented. There is, however, a second feature that is likely to raise eyebrows: the staircase. Providing access to the basement and the first floor, this is a glass and steel confection with the rise on each step having a series of lights inserted into it. These change colour constantly and if you were looking for difference from a standard Uniqlo branch in the UK, this would be the standout feature.

Set into the walls of the stairwell are multiple monitors, all with video clips of thin-looking people modelling the product. When the one and only French store opened just behind Place de l’Opéra, in Paris, in 2009 (a second store is due to open imminently at La Défense in that city), a lit staircase provided ingress to the store. What has been done at Regent Street does feel like a move on from this, but head up or down to either of the two other floors and while this is a perfectly respectable iteration of a Uniqlo store, it does not, in truth, seem particularly different from other branches in central London.

That said, this is still a far more modern store environment than you are likely to come across along much of Regent Street and it does succeed in being both value-led and a long way distant from anything else along this grand thoroughfare.

Uniqlo has 13 stores in London and if Kuwahara has his way there will be others including a megastore, although plans on this seem sketchy.

It is a measure of the importance of London to the brand, however, that there is just the one outlet in France and two in New York (the newly opened 5th Avenue outlet and SoHo) with one more set to welcome shoppers in the latter on 34th Street before the year ends.

For Uniqlo parent Fast Retailing, the UK remains the most important market outside the home country and the investment that has been made into updating the Regent Street store stands as testimony to this.

Uniqlo, it would appear, knows a good thing when it sees one and will offer it to all and sundry – although prices do seem to have moved up a notch since this time last year.