Retail Opinion - John Ryan examines alternatives to stand-alone high street stores

What about a

toy shop-in-shop?

From 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 judge by what’s happening out there, almost anything goes (although the idea of Ann Summers popping up, as it were, in your local Screwfi x might be a stretch - but on the other could do worse than head off to the nearest large retail park. hand, why not?). From B&Q appearing in Asda, to online Retail park?! Yes, those places on the edges of our towns and electrical giant AO.com setting up in Tesco, the world of the cities which you can drive to, park for free and walk straight into shop-in-shop is as varied as most high streets. stores of your choosing. Everybody, it seems, is a winner. If you were a toy retailer

Many retail parks are not the fi rst places that spring to mind with space inside a hypermarket or within the premises of if you want an ‘experience’ of the kind that seems to preoccupy a large retail park tenant, footfall would seem to be a given, the minds of so many retailers these days. They tend to be a bit with all the good things that tend to follow from this. 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. “Why are there so 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-of-

All of which means that since the unlocking of few toy town retail parks are locations they will non-essential retail, they have been outperforming the retail market as a whole. The question therefore retailers never make it to. The urban London dweller is a person for whom ‘local’ means not straying much is: why are there so few toy retailers making their making beyond the capital’s West End, for instance, and mark on retail parks? The answer is actually pretty straightforward. Unless you happen to be Hamleys, or a toy shop their mark on retail the idea of heading out to the periphery seems like time wasted. On which reckoning, there would appear to 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 parks? ” 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 owner/operator. want to cover your bases. There are competitors in both

But there is still another possible method of entry: become locations, of course. On the high street, there will always part of somebody else’s store. The shop-in-shop is having a be others willing to take you on mano a mano. The same ‘bit of a moment’ as those with large footprints seek to fi nd is true of retail parks where there are, and almost ways of justifying their size - while those who are too small to always have been, specialists that call this home: even consider occupying a store of this kind cosy up to bigger Smyths is a case in point. merchants to become part of the action. The theory runs that this Just as on the high street, however, it’s means the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, and that your job to put your best shop-in-shop when two or more complementary retail brands buddy up under a foot forward if you want to make this single roof, they become more of a destination: a kind of de facto form of retail work for you - it’s still department store. possible to be in a high footfall area

The granddaddy of them all is Next. This is a retailer that has and not realise a profi t. multiple retail park branches - some of them very large indeed. There’s no easy fi x, but you should Many play host to not just their own-brand merchandise but be aware that there are alternatives offer a home to everybody from Costa Coffee to Laura Ashley to the classic standalone store and (the latter has opened a shop-in-shop in the Next fl agship that relying on the offi ces of another on Leicester’s Fosse Park). And the point is that there seems might be a good way to put your toe little limit to what Next and a few others like it are prepared to in the water to see if there is long-term entertain when it comes to renting out excess space in their shops. mileage in the shop-in-shop or in a

So why not toy shops? Are there any rules about what sort of different market. retailer could become, in effect, a tenant of a larger concern? To It’s worth thinking about.

John Ryan examines alternatives to the classic standalone high street toy store

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.