“Reduce to the Max”

Christoph Bründl and his team create magic moments – a matrix of experience, service, and insights gained from many years of learning.

BRÜNDL “REDUCE TO THE MAX”

When Christoph Bründl talks about his flagship store, which reopened after a refit in Kaprun last October, he speaks about people as a distinguishing element, sensual flow, and dopamine-flooded brains. A conversation about new experiences and meaningful sustainability.

Interview: Isabel Faiss. Photos: Bründl Your new flagship store is a spectacle of

service. It boasts 85 highly motivated employees, well-known sports personalities such as Hans Hofer or Fabian Stiepel on the sales floor, and even a dedicated concierge. Is it possible to translate such a staccato into a steady heartbeat?

Our flagship store has always been our laboratory or research centre, a place where we experiment. This is where we allow ourselves to indulge ideas like having a concierge. We actually went as far as hiring a professional from the hotel industry. The five-star hotel business has always been our mecca for trend scouting. If you only measure yourself against the competition in your own genre, you become too similar. That is why we deliberately look to other industries for inspiration. We refer to our concierge, or hospitality manager, as M3, which stands for Magic Moments Manager. He keeps an eye on procedures and magic moments in our house.

What are these magic moments? What concrete function does M3 perform in this context?

The first aspect is always the quality of first contact when a customer meets a person in our store. Yes, we have deliberately dropped the term “employee”. We have clearly defined how the greeting, first contact, and the personal demand analysis should proceed, because this is a lever for inspiration and additional sales. In addition to maintaining order and cleanliness in and around the store, M3 also needs to ensure that the hospitality area is running smoothly. Simultaneously, he is our day-to-day

A lighthouse project with radiant effect: Bründl’s newly opened flagship store in Kaprun serves as the company’s innovation centre. What works here will be rolled out in other branches.

market researcher, who proactively seeks contact with customers. He acts as a seismograph, yet also a salesperson with responsibility for a department. This is the only way to gain credibility within the team.

Is M3 a blueprint for other Bründl stores?

In part. In Ischgl, for example, we almost exclusively welcome guests who place great value on personal service that extends far beyond our store. In a store of that size in such a prominent location, we can centralise a concierge as a service hub that provides our customers inside information about topics such as snow hikes, ski huts, and outdoor adventures. In many respects, Kaprun defines state-of-the-art within the Bründl universe. The same applies to sustainability. We have established seven topical touchpoints, intentionally left plenty of open space, and opted for a completely new media concept. This is definitely an innovation that we will introduce into all stores, as content can be readily rolled out via films, for example.

To what extent do all your other stores benefit from the expertise rollout from the innovation lab in Kaprun?

Over the last four years, our employee app has developed into an incredibly efficient tool to share best practices, exchange magic moments, and communicate directly with all people at Bründl. We now conduct most e-learning courses and product training sessions via the app and motivate our team by sharing achievements, as well as positive and negative insights.

All-encompassing experiences – the magic moments – are a key component of the new flagship store. However, this experience must satisfy completely different needs today. Gamification is the buzzword. What experience do you hope to offer your customers in Kaprun?

We approach the topic of experience differently. Instead of piling on more and more, our principle is: reduce to the max. We aim to draw people into a different world. We have no interest in creating a flashy Las Vegas atmosphere, including sensory overload. Our goal is to decelerate our sales floors. Our kids’ department is a prime example. It used to be equipped with touch terminals, but we replaced them with colouring books, a slide, and a climbing wall. Obviously, we also harness screens to integrate nature into the store via images, but we do not use them for advertisements. We strive to engage our customers in what we call a sensual flow. Nobody buys under stress. Retailing entails a “change of state” – we need to invite customers into our “zone” to activate the dopamine in their brains. This is easier to achieve with less stimuli, which is why we have massively reduced product pressure. The store now exudes a certain lightness and the time our customers spend with us has increased substantially.

What is, in your personal opinion, the lifeblood of this lighthouse project in Kaprun?

People are the distinguishing element and the determining factor whether customers buy or not. Retail is a people business. There are still plenty of customers who do not want to buy from a machine, who do not want to click. They want to touch, talk, connect, and feel. For them, online shopping is a sad monologue.