While watching my daughter at her gymnastics class last week, I overheard another parent talking about a kids’ birthday party they went to recently. It wasn’t the usual soft play centre but a more pleasantly scented… Lush store.
Now I must admit that, as both a retail analyst and parent, I had no idea that Lush hosted parties on its shopfloor. But it makes perfect sense – Lush isn’t just a shop but an experience. A wonderfully fragrant, sensory stimulating, bath bomb-making experience.
And that’s the kind of mentality that bricks & mortar retailers need today. You have to give shoppers something that a screen cannot. You need to embrace perpetual innovation. You need to continue to surprise and delight. And above all, as Theo Paphitis told me in an interview earlier this month, you need to have a reason to exist.
The Body Shop once had a reason to exist. Under founder Dame Anita Roddick, it pioneered ethical beauty in the 1970’s. Its focus on natural, fairtrade and cruelty-free products set the retailer apart from rivals, not to mention its strong stance on social and environmental justice issues. The Body Shop was genuinely ahead of its time.
Fast forward to 2024 and its overall proposition is still wildly relevant. The health and beauty category continues to thrive even in this tough climate and sustainable shopping has gone mainstream. And therein lies the problem. The Body Shop is no longer the only place on the high street that shoppers can turn to for ethical products. It’s not the cheapest. It’s not most convenient. And you could make the argument that it’s not the most inspiring. So what exactly is its USP?
The Body Shop may have once been a trailblazer, but they’ve settled into the status quo. Being an early mover doesn’t mean you stop moving. Standing still is the most dangerous thing you can do in retail. You have to continuously evolve in order to stay relevant to customers. If you don’t, someone else certainly will.
So how do you stay relevant in the ever-changing world of retail? Your customer should always be your North Star. Start with the customer and then work backwards. How can you elevate the customer experience? What needs aren’t currently being met? How can you ‘go beyond’?
In the beauty space, you only need to look to a brand like Rituals to see what’s possible. Their philosophy of slowing down and transforming routines into special moments is evident the minute you walk through the door. Customers receive a cup of tea or a hand massage. The store environment is calming and every product has a story. It’s unique, relevant and the perfect antidote to our fast-paced lives.
A key factor of Ritual’s success is its unique brand proposition. It views itself as a wellness and lifestyle brand, rather than a beauty brand, and therefore doesn’t see itself having any direct competitors. It also embraces technology to deliver a truly personalised experience and is continuously evolving its offer. This is how you win in retail today.
Look at some of the more notorious retail disruptors like Amazon. I’ve often attributed Amazon’s success to a relentless dissatisfaction with the status quo. Other high street retailers are now adopting a similar approach. Marks & Spencer CEO Stuart Machin refers to the business as being “positively dissatisfied” and now requires its head office staff to spend to spend a week on the shop floor. Morrisons is even inviting shoppers to join management meetings. Listening to your customers has never been more important. In today’s retail climate, no one can afford inaction.
It’s a bumper episode of #RetailDisrupted this week with retail consultant and high street champion Graham Soult. We discuss:
🔹 5m: Business rates 🔹 10m: Store closures – is there more rightsizing to do or has the industry now recalibrated? 🔹 14m: Wilko’s demise and rebirth: what went wrong and how will the new stores be different? 🔹 21m: Back from the brink: how to revive defunct brands 🔹 28m: Mixed fashion fortunes: Is Asos still relevant and what’s the secret to Next’s resilience? 🔹 37m: New Channel 5 Lidl documentary 🔹 40m: Future of the high street
US clothing chain Gap is the latest retailer to retreat from Britain’s high streets.
Incredibly sad but probably not too much of a surprise? The uncomfortable truth is that we have too many stores today. Meanwhile, the pandemic is accelerating the demise of mediocre/status-quo/irrelevant retail. Gap is unfortunately paying the price for years of inaction. They failed to adapt, failed to stay relevant to shoppers and failed to differentiate from their peers.
When was the last time you paid full price for something at Gap? Discounting is a zero-sum game.
The big question now is: can they exist as a pure online retailer? Gap joins the likes of Debenhams, Arcadia and T.M. Lewin which have recently disappeared from the high street and resurfaced as online-only brands. Is the Gap brand strong enough to stand out in a crowded online market? A few years ago, O2O (Online to Offline) was all the rage as Amazon, Zalando, Missguided, Boden and others started opening up shops. The Darwinian state of retail….
Perhaps the digital realm will become a graveyard for has-been brands? Gap’s move certainly feels like a slow death to me.
Last night, I spoke to the BBC about the 12,000 job cuts announced in the UK this week. Retail will certainly not be spared: Harrods, an iconic brand but reliant on international visitors, and Arcadia, a retailer that has quite simply failed to evolve, are collectively cutting 1,000+ jobs. TM Lewin, a brand that has been trading for over a century, is closing all of its shops and focusing exclusively online. Microsoft will be doing similar by shutting virtually all of its stores around the globe. Will 2020 see a reversal of the online-to-offline trend?
Who’s going to be hit worst? Those that failed to adapt pre-crisis of course. We’ll see an acceleration in the demise of mediocre or irrelevant retail. Buckle up, folks. It’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better.
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The phrase ‘the Amazon effect’ brings to mind images of boarded-up shops and retail bankruptcies.
We think of the 2,700 stores that shut or the 80,000 retail jobs that disappeared in the UK in the first half of 2018 alone. E-commerce, and Amazon in particular, is often positioned as the death knell for the high street.
I don’t buy into the ‘retail apocalypse’ narrative, but it must be acknowledged that this is a period of unprecedented change and naturally as spending shifts online, fewer stores are needed.
This isn’t rocket science, it is just about following the customer. Over the past five years, online sales of non-food products in the UK have doubled. Now, nearly 20% of all retail sales take place online. Today, people are ubiquitously connected. They live online. They have access to billions of products right at their fingertips that turn up on doorsteps, often free of charge, the very next day.
Online shopping has become utterly effortless, and that has shaken bricks-and-mortar retail to its core. 2018 was the year that retail chief executives finally pulled their heads out of the sand and acknowledged that there is an oversupply of retail space and there is retail space that is no longer fit for purpose.
Blaming Amazon
Amazon is an easy scapegoat. After all, it’s thought that around a third of UK e-commerce sales go through Amazon’s platform (in the US, it’s closer to the 50% mark).
And, after years of chipping away at the high street, Amazon is now among the top five retailers in the UK. Not many retailers can match ‘the everything store’ on range, convenience and, perhaps to a lesser extent, price. Not many retailers have 100 million customers around the globe willing to fork out roughly $100 annually just for the privilege of shopping with them. Not many have embedded themselves into the shopper’s life – and physical home – in the way that Amazon has; a testament to the strength of its ecosystem.
But it is also true that not many retailers have deep pockets like Amazon – it spends more on R&D than any other American company. It is able to constantly throw ideas against the wall because it has been afforded the luxury of long-term thinking – and not paying a whole lot of tax hasn’t hurt. Business rates account for less than 1% of its sales (for comparison, Debenhams’ bill as a percentage of sales is almost 4 times that amount). The playing field has been tilted in Amazon’s favour since day one and I believe retailers are right to call for legislation to be rewritten for the digital age.
High street woes go beyond Amazon
But the industry’s problems run deeper than Amazon. Retailers continue to grapple with the dangerous combination of rising costs and soft demand which has created considerable pressure and particularly exposed some of the weaker retailers with underlying issues, such as Toys R Us.
Real disposable income growth has been weak for a good decade and now the big unknown that is Brexit is added to the mix. In a similar vein to the weather, Brexit may be a convenient excuse for retailers reporting weak results, but it’s clear that shoppers will rein in spending during times of political and economic uncertainty.
What else is behind the high street’s woes? Although ‘the Amazon effect’ is often cited, what about ‘the Aldi effect’ or ‘the Primark effect’? There are a handful of very agile bricks-and-mortar disruptors that are weeding out the complacent incumbents.
We are at the beginning of quite a fundamental shift in consumer values, as shoppers prioritise spending on experiences over simply acquiring more material goods. Are we perhaps nearing ‘peak stuff’?
In any case, it’s clear we are at the intersection of major technological, economic and societal changes that are profoundly reshaping the retail sector.
So it’s not all Amazon’s fault. In fact, in many ways Amazon has been a force for good. It has stamped out complacency and made everyone raise their game, all to the benefit of the customer.
What would retail look like if Amazon didn’t exist? In a nutshell, consumers would be more tolerant of mediocre service.
Amazon’s technology roots and passion for invention are what sets it distantly apart from rivals. Many of Amazon’s past innovations can, in fact, be easily forgotten because they have simply become today’s normal. Think back to the late 1990s: online shopping used to be quite a laborious process. Amazon cut the friction out by launching one-click shopping, personalised product recommendations and user-generated ratings and reviews.
Delivery, meanwhile, wasn’t always fast and free. Prime significantly raised customer expectations, leaving competitors with little choice but to invest in their own fulfilment capabilities. Amazon went on to tackle one of the biggest barriers to online shopping – missed deliveries – with the 2011 launch of Amazon Lockers. Today, virtually every major Western retailer offers click-and-collect (though Argos was perhaps unknowingly ahead of its time).
Most of Amazon’s innovations catch competitors on the back foot, leaving them in the undesirable position of reacting to rather than leading change. So what is ‘the Amazon effect’, really?
It’s Tesco rolling out same-day delivery nationwide.
It’s M&S trialling scan-and-go technology, allowing shoppers to skip checkout queues ahead of an impending Amazon Go launch in London.
It’s Waitrose delivering groceries directly into your fridge.
It’s Asos allowing shoppers to ‘try before they buy’.
It’s Zara shoppers collecting their online orders through automated pick-up points in-store.
And this is a global battle. ‘The Amazon effect’ is Ocado finally securing a string of international deals, as the Amazon-Whole Foods acquisition accelerates demand for online grocery shopping.
It’s Carrefour partnering with Google to launch Lea – its answer to Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant. In the US, Walmart offers customers a far superior experience today thanks to Amazon breathing down its neck. The retailer has even had a name change: after nearly half a century as Wal-Mart Stores, in 2018 the world’s largest retailer dropped Stores from its legal name to reflect the new digital era.
Amazon has impacted all aspects of retail, and now everyone is scrambling to either keep up with or distance themselves from the online behemoth. The link may be slightly more tenuous but it could even be argued that ‘the Amazon effect’ is Debenhams adding gyms and beauty bars to its stores. It’s John Lewis sending staff to theatre training and democratising personal shopping. It’s Next putting hair salons and Prosecco bars in its shops.
The opportunity
High street retailers are recognising that for all its perks, shopping on Amazon is still quite a functional, transactional experience. It has taken the touch and feel out of shopping and there is a massive opportunity for retailers to distance themselves from Amazon’s utilitarian image.
There is an opportunity to inject some personality and soul back into their stores, providing an immersive, memorable experience that simply can’t be replicated online. It’s about WACD: What Amazon Can’t Do.
This is why in the future, stores won’t just be a place to buy but also a place to eat, play, work, discover, learn and even borrow stuff. Retail space will be less about retail.
In summary, Amazon is almost singlehandedly redefining retail, at least in the Western world. Yes, there have been casualties and the industry should brace itself for more short-term pain as it reconfigures itself for the digital age.
But this is retail Darwinism, it’s survival of the fittest. It’s evolve or die. Amazon’s existence has weeded out those underperforming retailers who can’t deliver on the basic principles of being relevant to their customers or standing out from rivals. But those left standing will be stronger for having reinvented themselves in the age of Amazon.
Retailers have many “dog ate my homework” excuses for when trading is less than stellar, but when a late snowstorm forces you to temporarily shut over half your stores, it’s bound to impact the top line.
While it’s important to acknowledge the impact of the Beast from the East, it doesn’t take away from the fact that Debenhams, like many department stores today, is struggling to stay relevant.
Strategically, Debenhams is doing all the right things, but today’s results highlight the scale of the challenges confronting UK department stores. Not only are they facing a perfect storm of rising costs and subdued demand, but the original concept of a department store – one-stop shopping – has become completely eroded by online retail. Unfortunately for Debenhams, many stores are tethered to long-term leases so there is no quick fix for addressing the shift to online shopping.
Twenty-five stores will be reviewed as their leases come up for renewal over the next five years. In an ideal world, they’d be more bullish but with an average lease length of 18 years Debenhams doesn’t have the luxury of simply closing stores overnight. Instead, the focus will be on reinvention and rightsizing – they see potential for at least 30 stores to be downsized, in a similar vein to competitors like M&S and House of Fraser.
But make no mistake – the department store model is under threat. In the past, it made sense for retailers to dedicate 100,000-plus square feet to these ‘palaces of consumption’, aggregating lots of brands under one roof. But today, shoppers have access to millions of products at their fingertips, so the idea that a bricks and mortar retailer can still offer ‘everything under one roof’ becomes laughable. Department stores must reposition themselves to be less about product and more about experience. Winning in retail today means excelling where Amazon cannot.
Under Sergio Bucher (ex-Amazon), Debenhams is trying to do exactly that. They’ve embraced store reinvention, recognising that the department store of the future will be a place not only to buy stuff, but also to eat, discover, play and even work. Partnerships with brands like Swoon and Maisons du Monde create a point of differentiation, while the installation of gyms and beauty bars and potential collaboration with WeWork allow Debenhams to make better use of excess space while simultaneously driving footfall. Store reinvention’s not cheap but it’s better than standing still.
But amidst all this talk of transformation, it’s easy to lose focus on the basics of retail – price, product, service. This is where Debenhams shoppers have arguably been left feeling underwhelmed. Pricing must be sharper and more trustworthy, range must be simplified (though more compelling) and the overall proposition must become more experiential and service-led. Otherwise, they risk a lot of empty treadmills and brow bars.
A sad week for retail and a stark reminder of the dangers of complacency.
Toys R Us and Maplin ultimately collapsed because they failed to adapt to changing shopping habits. Let’s not ignore the elephant in the room. What would make a shopper choose Maplin over Amazon? The retail titan’s endless assortment, low prices and increasingly speedy delivery left Maplin with limited fighting power. The high street retailer was doing everything it could to distinguish itself from pure-play online rivals – focusing on customer service, product expertise and the instore experience – but clearly that wasn’t enough.
While Maplin may have been a victim of the Amazon effect, Toys R Us was simply a victim of complacency. The customer experience was, at best, underwhelming due to a lack of investment both in stores and online. They sat idly by as new competitive threats – from B&M to Smyths – chipped away at their business. In toy retailing, you need be either cheap, convenient or fun but Toys R Us failed to deliver in each of these areas, leaving them stuck in a retail no man’s land.
As a specialist, the Toys R Us experience should have been a magical one with instore events, dedicated play areas and product demonstrations. The reality was a soulless shed with very little innovation or technology to draw shoppers in. Saddled with debt, Toys R Us was unable to flaunt its specialist credentials and reposition its stores as genuine destinations.
The demise of Toys R Us should serve as a powerful reminder of the need to rejuvenate the instore experience. Bricks and mortar retailers can’t compete with Amazon’s breadth of assortment and delivery capabilities, so they must leverage physical assets and reconfigure stores to become proper destinations. As I say time and again, the future role of the bricks and mortar store will be less transactional and more experiential. But sadly, many more stores will need to close to reflect the shift in spending habits.
Meanwhile, the combination of rising prices and subdued demand is putting considerable pressure on retailers, and particularly exposing those with underlying issues. Burdened by debt, Toys R Us was simply unable to adapt to a changing retail environment.
You can hear me discuss more on Toys R Us on the BBC World Service here.
I don’t buy into the ‘retail apocalypse’ narrative, but it must be acknowledged that this is a period of unprecedented change and naturally as spending shifts online, fewer stores are needed.
n reinvention and rightsizing – they see potential for at least 30 stores to be downsized, in a similar vein to competitors like M&S and House of Fraser.
