brand new thinking
This isn’t usually a blog for work but in the spirit of ‘things of interest’, the new Being-Digital new website (designed and built by us) launched earlier this week.
Being-Digital is a conference for the discerning digital beings amongst us. Hopefully a place to garner some knowledge and mingle with the digiteratti. Amanda will be in attendance as a panellist, probably without the pink cowboy hat.
More info on the website and digital brochure.
These beautiful billboards from the Johnson Banks thought for the week, reminded me of these blank billboards in São Paulo, photographed by Tony de Marco, originally via the Creative Review blog. This New (or is that Nu?) Austerity trend seems to be gaining traction.
On our recent trip to London we took in a few of the capital’s retail incarnations. We generally stay away from store openings preferring to wait until the fuss has died down so see how a store is really operating and if all the fuss is worthwhile.
Primark
Our first destination was Primark on Oxford Street. Boy was this place rammed. 11 o’clock on a Friday morning and the place was chock full of girls out shopping. We listened to a few conversations and several groups of friends seem to have made a special trip. What did we do before we could use our mobiles to call our frinds in the same shop and shout, “where are yer?”. Even the security guards, who could have been a bit more friendly, perhaps kitted out in a ’smile you’re on camera’ t-shirt rather than the ubiquitous day-glo waistcoat, couldn’t stop the hordes from ravaging the product, with the queue for the fitting rooms being 20 metres long at least. The environment was perfectly fine, Dalziel and Pow as always do a very good job of creating an environment that can be quickly changed and adapted using graphics and lighting and some good visual merchandising, I particularly liked the black mannequins and mirrored back panels. A store like this perfectly illustrates the point that a value store doesn’t have to look cheap.
The main focus of Primark really has to be the product. Apart from the homeware department (corner) this was bang on. This is really what differentiates a retailer and makes it a true destination. That’s why there was nobody buying homeware, who wants this kind of beige tat, (piss catcher anyone?) I’ve no idea what kind of customer this kind of stuff is aimed at and of course there was nobody buying which is a shame because it lets the store down. If it was me I’d take it our completely and wait until the basement is done, move it down there and create a much better bought, more on trend, more substantial offer, a destination in its own right. You only have to look at Zara Home (more of which in a later post) to see what can be achieved very simply, what should be sold and how it should be merchandised.
Apologies for the picture quality, especially the side of my head, but you get the gist of how busy it was even on a Friday morning. Strangely Next over the road was pretty quiet and so was New Look. New Look only had one image (that I saw) on the ground floor of Lily Allen despite the launch of her product line only the week before and Next was, well, bland as usual. Dalziel & Pow have just redesigned Next in Bluewater which we haven’t seen yet but hopefully it’ll be a big move on especially the standard of photography, although I suspect it may just catch up to the competition.
Recently we attended a new business meeting with a prospective client. Previously we’d sent them some of our marketing blurb material and had been rebuffed. however since then we’d had a phone call to arrange a meeting, so off we went.
This is a business that works in fashion retail and considering they’d invited us we assumed that the answer to the question at the top of this post was a given, i.e. of course design can make a difference, and rather a big one at that. The Design Council has even got a whole website dedicated to the difference design can make, even going as far as to say “Every £100 a design alert business spends on design increases turnover by £225.” That’s a huge fact, multiply that investment by a few thousand or hundred thousand pounds and it’s pretty good odds that some of that turnover will be profit, if it’s done right of course, and of course there’s the Design Effectiveness Awards. So, when in our meeting, we came across the question of design actually making a difference how did we answer? Well, not very well actually. We’d made an assumption that an invitation to meet meant this prospective client had an understanding of retail design (since that’s what we do) which rapidly became apparent that this wasn’t the case, even though his business is a reasonably succesful fashion retailer with a chain of 40 shops nationwide and a very succesful standalone e-tail business. We’d done our research, visited a few of his stores, spent quite a few hours going through his websites, even shopped on one of them, but what were totally unprepared for was the scepticism that we encountered about our industry and retail design in particular.
So although we know the answer to our initial question, can design make a difference?, perhaps the real question should be how do we educate someone who is so cynical about what we do? Do we go into a meeting armed with Design Council facts and figures? I suspect that’s not immediately going to win someone over, especially at a senior level. His reasoning was that they were doing pretty well thank you, why should we ‘add some design in’ or some ‘nice graphics’ as that sounds a bit risky.
Of course the answer is his business already uses design, the problem is it uses it very badly so his experience of using design is not a good one. It already pays money for bad design, and bad marketing material which is inconsistent and amateur. This in turn makes them look cheap and unauthentic, (as opposed to a true value proposition) and doesn’t make the difference to his bottom line that good design would. I suspect the cost of his bad design is roughly similar to the cost of good design but the true cost of the bad design might be his turnover is less than it should be, he alienates some customers because they don’t want to shop in his stores or when they are in them can’t find what they want, see the product well enough or find a way to purchase it. The longer term cost might be that soon his stores will look tired and dated, in fact some of them already do, and newer, fresher more vibrant and entreprenurial businesses in the same retail field will come along and take his ground, or even established retailers looking for a move into a growth market will take his profit margin and he won’t be able to compete because he won’t have a strategic vision that includes a joined up retail design strategy because he underestimates its importance.
All retailers know they constantly need to look over their shoulders as well as being able to reinvent, renew and constantly evolve which is why a good relationship with a design company that understands a business can be worth its weight in gold; quite literally.
A good view on Retail Bulletin about how to use we ‘consultants’. We often have a different view, not necessarily better, mainly because our angle of attack and our view of the world may be different.
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