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OPINION
What about a
toy shop-in-shop? F
rom reading various recent reports recently, one thing that’s apparent is that if you want to almost guarantee seeing other people - people who are shopping - you could do worse than head off to the nearest large retail park. Retail park?! Yes, those places on the edges of our towns and cities which you can drive to, park for free and walk straight into stores of your choosing. Many retail parks are not the first places that spring to mind if you want an ‘experience’ of the kind that seems to preoccupy the minds of so many retailers these days. They tend to be a bit anodyne and have an identikit approach to store design. But there’s no denying their convenience. They also happen to be cheap to be a part of - or at least far less expensive than most high streets. All of which means that since the unlocking of non-essential retail, they have been outperforming the retail market as a whole. The question therefore is: why are there so few toy retailers making their mark on retail parks? The answer is actually pretty straightforward. Unless you happen to be Hamleys, or a toy shop of similar scale, the price per sq m may be low, but there are too many sq m per unit to make the whole thing a paying proposition for the standard toy shop owner/operator. But there is still another possible method of entry: become part of somebody else’s store. The shop-in-shop is having a ‘bit of a moment’ as those with large footprints seek to find ways of justifying their size - while those who are too small to even consider occupying a store of this kind cosy up to bigger merchants to become part of the action. The theory runs that this means the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, and that when two or more complementary retail brands buddy up under a single roof, they become more of a destination: a kind of de facto department store. The granddaddy of them all is Next. This is a retailer that has multiple retail park branches - some of them very large indeed. Many play host to not just their own-brand merchandise but offer a home to everybody from Costa Coffee to Laura Ashley (the latter has opened a shop-in-shop in the Next flagship on Leicester’s Fosse Park). And the point is that there seems little limit to what Next and a few others like it are prepared to entertain when it comes to renting out excess space in their shops. So why not toy shops? Are there any rules about what sort of retailer could become, in effect, a tenant of a larger concern? To
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judge by what’s happening out there, almost anything goes (although the idea of Ann Summers popping up, as it were, in your local Screwfix might be a stretch - but on the other hand, why not?). From B&Q appearing in Asda, to online electrical giant AO.com setting up in Tesco, the world of the shop-in-shop is as varied as most high streets. Everybody, it seems, is a winner. If you were a toy retailer with space inside a hypermarket or within the premises of a large retail park tenant, footfall would seem to be a given, with all the good things that tend to follow from this. That said, if you follow this course of action, what about your standalone store(s) in the heart of the town/city? Might they not suffer? Possibly. Yet there are those shoppers for whom edge-oftown retail parks are locations they will never make it to. The urban London dweller is a person for whom ‘local’ means not straying much beyond the capital’s West End, for instance, and the idea of heading out to the periphery seems like time wasted. On which reckoning, there would appear to be room for both high street and retail park denizens. If you are a multi-site operation, then there are strong arguments for being in both places if you want to cover your bases. There are competitors in both locations, of course. On the high street, there will always be others willing to take you on mano a mano. The same is true of retail parks where there are, and almost always have been, specialists that call this home: Smyths is a case in point. Just as on the high street, however, it’s your job to put your best shop-in-shop foot forward if you want to make this form of retail work for you - it’s still possible to be in a high footfall area and not realise a profit. There’s no easy fix, but you should be aware that there are alternatives to the classic standalone store and that relying on the offices of another might be a good way to put your toe in the water to see if there is long-term mileage in the shop-in-shop or in a different market. It’s worth thinking about.
Why are there so few toy retailers making their mark on retail parks?
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John Ryan is Stores Editor of business magazine Retail Week. He has worked for the title for more than a decade covering store design, visual merchandising and what makes things sell in-store. In a previous life, he was a buyer. 17
John Ryan examines alternatives to the classic standalone high street toy store
