The last 5 years I have been working with Footasylum to completely overhaul a tired retail proposition and transform their store concept to make it more relevant to its target consumer and become a high street leader in store experience with closer relevance to the brands it sells in-store.
This work culminated with short-listing for Retail Week Store of the Year 2023 for the Oxford Street Flagship earlier this year.
Over the first 18 months we trailed and tested new fixtures, signage elements, digital installations, materials and store & category layouts in existing stores.
This helped gain invaluable insight and learning into what the new store concept should be.
The first new store brief was for a new Flagship concept on Northumberland St Newcastle. Work started just before COVID and continued through the pandemic working remotely with the internal teams and two former colleagues, a visual artist and brand communication designer to develop the design.
The store opened immediately after the second lock-down and has proved to be a major success. From this concept we developed a take down secondary High St store concept which is being rolled out nationally.
The arrival of new owners in 2022 brought an urgency to expand the new store programme. In 2023 Flagships in Lakeside & Bullring, standard stores in Watford and Leicester were opened as well as the marquee Flagship at Oxford Street and a further Flagship at Metro Centre in 2024.
Footasylum had traditionally been a male driven retailer with only a token women’s presence in store. With a rapidly growing women’s market in sports apparel and footwear I was briefed to develop a standalone concept for women’s retail.
Along side testing and trials for the main store concept we developed new fixtures, furniture, branding and digital presence for the women's concept. This lead to a new store concept that elevated and grew the women's category, but remained unmistakably Footasylum.
Following the trials, successful stores have been opened in Leeds, Stratford, Cardiff and Birmingham Bullring and lead to the development of highly successful new women's home apparel brands to drive the stores sales.
We tested new digital in-store features such as digital columns, ticker tape navigation, You-tube screens, transparent LED windows, footwear screens and mid floor 360 display cubes. Running parallel we worked with the marketing & brand team to create new dynamic content for both large and small scale in-store applications.
From the beginning when I first visited the existing Footasylum stores the first thing I noticed was a virtually non-existent digital presence.
This was a huge surprise for a retailer who's key partners such as Nike & Adidas were driven by digital content. To compound this Footasylum had a huge online presence and following through its work on its cult You-tube channel and a new very successful online sales platform that had been created through the pandemic.
After small scale trials and tests in smaller stores and at the Newcastle Flagship the digital strategy was refined and rolled out across the next 4 Flagships & women’s stores.
The whole digital strategy was amplified for the Oxford Street store allowing us to implement installations on a large and dramatic way.