Westfield goes east

Shopping centre opening days are among my favourite occasions in retail. There’s so much expectation among the staff ahead of the stores opening for business, and so much excitement among the shoppers when they pour in the doors. They sum up the very best of what retail is all about.

I’ve been to a few in my six-and-a-half years of doing this job and Westfield Stratford City was no disappointment. There was the obligatory razzmatazz in the shape of Nicole Scherzinger from the Pussycat Dolls, loads of retail chiefs including Marc Bolland, Philip Green and Charlie Mayfield, and the stupid cultish clapping when Apple opens.

It was an exhausting and occasionally chaotic morning, but here are some of my thoughts:

• It is a very good centre, with the high quality finishes we saw at Westfield London. Management is going to be crucial given where it is, so it’s a good job Westfield are good at it
• It is extremely well connected. I got there in 20 minutes from the Retail Week office in Camden, not an obvious part of the catchment, and most of that time was spent walking to St Pancras. That connectivity gives it a very wide catchment of shoppers.
• There are some particularly good stores. I liked the new M&S store format, especially in food, while Primark’s store had a lot more VM than I’d seen in its stores before. River Island has done an outstanding job. The new H Samuel and Goldsmiths formats were interesting, Forever 21 was proving hugely popular, Republic and JD likewise, and Dixons, Mothercare and Game were among the retailers having put their best foot forward.
• It was very busy and while you can’t base a view on day 1, the customer demographic wasn’t the high spending home counties types Westfield wants to attract. The centre will need to pull in more people from Essex and more affluent parts of London. Without wishing to sound impolite, it wasn’t a crowd which will be spending a lot in John Lewis, let alone the Breitling store, and the atmosphere in the malls wasn’t pleasant by the time I left. Obviously it won’t always be as crowded but it will be interesting to see what sort of shopper comes at the weekend and in the evening.
• Customer traffic is much stronger in some parts of the centre than others. The main entrance from Stratford station seems to be by far the main point of entry, which is good news for the retailers like M&S, Forever 21 and Fatface which are located by it.
• At the other end of the arc, the upmarket area anchored by John Lewis and Waitrose, and with a good food market called the Great Eastern Market, will have to work harder for shoppers, although their customers may appreciate the lack of crowds. There’s a nice little upmarket cluster down here with the likes of Lakeland and Hotel Chocolat there and Foyles to come too.
• Some shops weren’t open, most strikingly H&M, which had people queuing past its hoarding for Forever 21. None of the Aurora/Karen Millen brands were open either, and neither were Jaeger or the Disney Store. I suspect this was due to deals being done late with the retailers holding on for the best terms
• The big disappointment was the outside street area, which provides the link through to the Olympic Park. By next year this will surely have filled up but for now it’s a rather forlorn and windswept place with a West Ham shop and not much else. The bad weather this afternoon showed the problem with half-covered, half-uncovered schemes.

One retailer I spoke to was unsure about the location but had been offered such good terms and an early break clause by Westfield which meant that there really was nothing to lose. I suspect others will be in the same boat, and the key to the success of the scheme will be bringing in more affluent customers into an area many of them might not have set foot in previously.

But don’t bet against Westfield. People said you couldn’t sell luxury in White City, and look what hapenned there. They are a hugely determined outfit and will pull out all the stops to make sure this scheme is just as successful as its sister on the other side of town.