The recession may be squeezing retail but the third edition of Retail Week’s stores book shows retailers are still using design innovation to raise their game. John Ryan takes a look at some of this year’s entries.

There’s been a tendency to regard 2009 as a bad year for retailers. But while, for some, this has certainly proved the case, fortunately this has been far from the total picture.

So when it came to the business of choosing shops to include within the pages of Stores 2009, produced in association with Land Securities, it was very obvious the sheer number of retailers that have opened new space would make selection difficult… again.

However, even those retailers that have proved resilient in the face of the global financial onslaught have had to consider the manner in which things are done, and cost has been a factor. For this reason, the 50 stores that appear in Stores 2009, published today, have been sorted into categories: “green”, “budget”, “international”, “luxury”, “VM”, “food” and “pop-up stores”.

The latter is certainly the new kid on the block and in these turbulent times it has provided an effective way for brands and retailers to test new formats. Land Securities commercial director Ronan Faherty says: “Pop-ups are about maintaining profile. They don’t necessarily offer anything new - you can’t rely on pop-ups for the long term - but they do keep brands and retailers in the headlines.”

That said, plenty of retailers have unveiled novelty, with the luxury end of the market being responsible for many of the best-looking stores, in spite of the cost. As the competition has become keener in recession, those contending with reduced budgets have sought ways of outshining their rivals.

At this point mention should be made of the visual merchandiser because when cash is in short supply, good visual merchandising can be the difference between sale or no sale. Faherty says: “What I think is interesting, and will be going forward, is how visual merchandising is a way of energising a shop without huge capital expenditure.”

In these pages, a store has been chosen from each of the seven categories in Stores 2009, not perhaps because it is better, but because it typifies what is being done in that arena. As things have turned out, 2009 has been something of a vintage year for store design.

1. Green

Timberland
Westfield London

Sitting in a conference in Dallas recently, somebody remarked that the Timberland flagship in London takes a version of the abstract tree the outdoorwear retailer uses for its logo as the basis for its framework.

It’s a fair point and one that serves to emphasise the care that has gone into creating this store, where the provenance of the great bulk of its design can be traced back to sustainable materials.

It also happens to be dramatic and a bit of fun, something that isn’t always the case with retailers who enter the world of green store design. From the recycled cobblers lasts, repurposed to act as perimeter wall display accessories, to the pair of boots attached to a mid-floor pillar that belonged to a store painter called “Steph”, this shop is about taking the notion of sustainability and playing with it - rather than using it as a cudgel with which to beat the consumer.

For many retailers, green store design is now a well-rehearsed series of design tropes, but Timberland has managed to add something to the debate.

2. International

Topshop
New York
Singling out any of the international stores covered in Stores 2009 is no simple task as they are uniformly good and all different. It makes sense, however, to choose Topshop for the sheer bravado exhibited by Sir Philip Green in his first North American foray.

There are few retailers that would make US landfall on New York’s Broadway, strip and convert a four-floor building and then open it with the kind of razzmatazz more normally associated with the arrival of a Democratic president in the city.

Not only does this store exemplify the best of British, but its design has also proved sufficiently arresting for large parts of it to be arriving back in the home country already. This is a shop that makes emphatic use of its SoHo cast-iron frame, has some of the best visual merchandising in New York and which has managed to create a real fashion buzz in a city that has been under the cosh financially for more than two years.

The question that remains is where will Green’s second Manhattan store be?

3. Budget

Clas Ohlson
Croydon

Clas Ohlson is a Swedish retail phenomenon that offers a hybrid electricals, DIY and homewares format where shoppers, a little like in Ikea, find themselves buying things they didn’t really know they wanted.

They do so in a store where although prices are low, there is no sense that you are walking into a low-price interior. Like Primark, Clas Ohlson is an egalitarian retail concept where there is likely to be something for everybody.

And all of this is conducted in a space where shoppers can find their way around almost intuitively, helped by large graphics that simply use the products on sale to guide. This store also happens to be just about the best male crèche anywhere.

A second UK branch opened in Manchester in April and on a recent visit looked just as busy as the Croydon store.

4. Pop-up stores

Clemens en August
Haus der Kunst, Munich

Think pop-up and in the present scheme of things a picture will normally be conjured up of rough concrete, vinyl or wood floors, maybe a wooden palette or two and an interior where a virtue is made out of bare necessity.

This is a no-frills format, even when semi-luxury goods are being sold. But it isn’t always this way, as this Munich store shows. Clemens en August (the name is a spelling out of the acronym that may be rather more familiar to many as C&A) is a store format that pops up in museums rather than empty shop units, but it follows the same rules.

Overseen by a scion of the C&A Brenninkmeijer family, the Clemens en August collection, a luxury offer and nothing to do with what can be found in the budget fashion retailer’s branches, appeared this year in Munich’s Haus der Kunst gallery.

As a large white space with good lighting, the gallery shares many of the attributes of grungier pop-up stores and, like them, it is now consigned to history.

5. Luxury

Liberty
London
Regent Street is a London icon that lives and breathes its arts-and-crafts roots, but this has not meant it has lost track of how to present luxury in a contemporary manner.

Its most recent transformation has involved reconfiguring the ground floor, creating new rooms and being bold enough to change the shopping experience.

The outcome is impressive, whether it’s the red scent capsules in the beauty department, which allow customers a full-on perfume encounter, or the “scarf room” - a space just for head and neckwear.

This is once more a store where there is a real whiff of the louche. Its jewellery room also has something of the gallery about it, with internally lit glass edge-to-edge cases adding to the sense of a close encounter with precious objects.

Luxury retailing should involve interiors that make the customer feel part of a highly cosseted and select group. Liberty is again a destination for those in search of this.

6. Visual merchandising

Size?
Bristol

A small shop on Bristol’s Horsefair uses the name of the street it sits on to provide many of the visual merchandising cues for its interior.

As a purveyor of street clothing and trainers, this wouldn’t perhaps be the first place that you’d expect to find a life-size horse wearing a bib, but the equine mannequin takes centre stage in this shop.

However, when combined with graffiti-style graphics and a reproduction of an 1824 painting of the Horsefair, it seems to work.

The simple white, open-fronted wardrobes used to define the perimeter give the stock the same prominence as the horse in the middle of the shop.

Unexpected all round, and a good example of how visual merchandising is about more than making things look nice.

7. Food

Recipease
London

Jamie Oliver’s kingdom expands with this deli that’s both a food store and a cookery school. It’s an almost entirely new type of retailing where shoppers can wander in, pick up a few ingredients and then, if they want to, learn how to use them to make a meal - in the company of other initiates.

This is food porn, where you eat with your eyes, and it would be hard to leave this shop without buying something. In design terms, the interior uses high standards of traditional craft and joinery to create the ambience of a rustic French market or perhaps a rather chi-chi kitchen, rather than a food shop.

Probably not for the faint of pocket, it nonetheless adds value by providing cookery lessons that can be taken away and reused at a future date.

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