Liquid Retail, Part 2: Be More than a Store

A 6-part guide to the key trends changing the face of retail
Featured in A1 Retail Magazine

Part 2: Be More than a Store

Liquid retail is the fluid approach retailers need to adopt to survive and thrive

By Emma Gullick, Associate Creative Director at design agency Phoenix Wharf

The Big Re-think

Flexibility is a key part of liquid retail thinking, as retailers reconsider traditional categories and business models. There’s no better place to start than with your bricks and mortar portfolio.

Optimising Real Estate Value

Brands are increasingly looking to maximise real estate value by transforming stores into event spaces, exercise class locations and even live music venues, out-of-hours as well as during the normal nine to five. High-street handmade cosmetics brand Lush, for example, has created spas within some larger stores, with own-product treatments right up to a premium price point.

Roaming Retail

From Shoreditch to LA and Berlin, the impressive Browns Nomad concept from luxury fashion retailer Browns is ‘a pioneering take on a semi-permanent, roaming retail — a 21st century response to the pop-up model, which looks to reinvent the notion of traditional retail by creating unique experiences that are tailoredto the city and neighbourhood within which they live.’

Another great example of a retailer-on-the-move comes from shoe retailer Vans, who took over what used to be the Old Vic Tunnels below London’s Waterloo Station to create House of Vans, a 30,000 square foot brand space, incorporating a purpose-built skatepark, gallery, cinema, music venue and diner, with an attractive line-up of events that are ‘almost always entirely free’.

A Brush with Art

Brands and retailers have taken the term ‘curated’ to a new level recently by looking to art to help create experiential links with customers and elevate offers. At the new Coal Drops Yard COS flagship store, for example, major floorspace has been given over to art collaborations, echoing the brand’s previous creative partnerships at Milan Design Week.

From Art to Experience

Selfridges, always a luxury pioneer, has been exploring altered states of luxury alongside brands such as Loewe, Louis Vuitton and Gareth Pugh. Its ‘Radical Luxury’ concept space is an incredible one-of-a-kind: part-art-gallery, part-performance space and total retail experience. ‘See it. Buy it. Experience it’ the strapline runs.

From Experience to Retail

With retail looking to leisure, art and exhibition design for increased experiential fluidity, other disciplines are breaking boundaries in reverse. The Natural History Museum, for example, is broadening its approach to getting people through the door with a schedule of constantly changing events. Attend a morning yoga session under Hope, the blue whale, for example, or take part in a murder mystery. Sounds fun? Absolutely!