Home Articles posted by Tim (Page 43)

Home Successaries: Zara puts its House in Order

The attraction of Zara Home could never be denied for the fashion conscious householder with a desire to decorate their rooms with a stylish mix of distinctive design and a spectrum of colour basics.

 

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In line with Inditex’s clothing concepts, Zara home combined eye catching image makers with a core assortment of products appropriate for most every taste. To this commercially heady concoction Zara has added authority and range, creating expansive coordinated collections with newness but not the unapproachable novelty often associated with it.

Against its blanket of trademark white, the subtlety of oranges, greens, blues and purples presents stunning assortments, combining a wider array of accessories from candles to coat hangers, vases to Venetian blinds.

Also gone is the confusion of multi-room coordination pitting bed against bath, living against kitchen, replaced by a new and comfortable natural order where every room can be gloriously coordinated or treated as an independent project.

With this clarity of concept, Zara Home now has a powerful purpose for its stylish offer, sure to attract the doubters of the past, welcoming them into its beautiful bright home.

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Do you have a natural and creative USP, with a distinctive style and personality?

But do you struggle to add the commercial parameters into your assortment to find the balance of image makers, basics and best sellers?

 

We have worked with a variety of apparel and home fashion retailers creating assortment structures that drive commercial performance but which also protect and celebrate the unique creative USP of the brand. For more information…

tim.radley@vm-unleashed.com

VM-unleashed monitors and celebrates best practice such as Zara Home, to advise our clients and make then more profitable.

Underground Connection: A New World in Old Street

In an area of London not short of innovation, and with retail delights and surprises bursting out of every industrial alley way and distressed doorway, the newest players are moving underground, taking residence amongst the newsagents and cobblers of Old Street Station.

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Just arrived on the Northern line, F is the new pop-up store from French Connection., tapping into the trendy clientele commuting from city central. F has taken up residence for seven months, shunting its newest fashions through the festive frenzy with an opportunity to extend should the spring sunshine be generous and favourable to this adventurous arrival.

F is a hybrid shop. It includes a small ladies wear edit collection in its hundred square metres or so, but strategically acts as a collection point for its express ordering service. Whether bought online or in-store French Connection promises to deliver into store for pick-up by five pm the same day, literally allowing customers to arrive as one person and depart back to suburbia fully fashion refreshed.

The F store is part of a wider trend to use transport hubs for ordering and collecting everything from apples and pears to denim skinnies and fashionable flairs. No longer the inconvenience of home delivery, but the lifestyle luxury of never missing a step, or loosing your strides, in the high speed roll-out of Omni-channel opportunities.

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Never an F word spoken, as cool convenience panders to the time paucity of the workforce movers, and French Connection plays to the plaudits and pockets the price indifference.

Do you sell in the most attractive and convenient way, in relation to your customers’ lifestyle and movements? Can they browse and shop with freedom to collect in a place that is best for them?

VM-unleashed monitors and celebrates best practice such as F by French Connection, to advise our clients and make then more profitable.

We have recently worked with one of the world’s most recogniseable  automotive brands on a multi-channel strategy to sell and collect merchandise linking online with retail stores.

tim.radley@vm-unleashed.com

Stationery Mover Smiggle: Something to Write Home About

In a world once owned by big players, a movement towards personality and personalisation has swept like a new paint brush through the world of stationery, from Paperchase, to Blott and now to the up and coming from the land down under – Smiggle.

 

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Smiggle stores are density packed with colourful collections in bright bands of pink and green, encompassing everything from erasers to envelopes, from rucksacks and sticker packs.

Destination Scribble offers an eye-popping array of pens and pencils to fill the capacity of the most cavernous of pencil cases, whilst the Creative Wall features fabulous felt-tips and fibre-tips to bring colour into the life of even the most tepid teenage stationery traveller. Dynamic messages and promotions are strong and engaging with window displays to win, and internal activities and competitions galore.

After an initial foray into Stratford Westfield, Smiggle is set to roll-out to another dozen or so UK destinations. If the colourful combinations, fun atmosphere and tempting promotions take a firm foothold on the lined paper slopes of the UK market, then the writing may already be on the wall, both literally and figuratively, for some of the nation’s more complacent purveyors of pens, pencils and post-its.

Make a note of Smiggle.

 

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Are there new entrants in your sector? Are they introducing new ideas and inspiration from which you can learn and turn some of the same old proposition into something exciting and fresh?

VM-unleashed constantly monitors best practice such as Smiggle, to provide the most up to date and best practice guidance for its clients.

Personal Spaces: A Meeting of Monsoon Minds

Monsoon and Accessorize, although long time co-inhabitants of the same family home, have rarely and inconsistently been seen out in public together.

 

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However lifestyle changes and a move towards the evolution of an intimate third place for women have resulted in a more common and strategic crossing of paths, with not only shared store space but a single and a more powerful customer proposition.

Celebrating the home as a private space, a place for leisure, relaxation and contemplation the advent and evolution of loungewear, homewear, resort wear, crossing the boundaries between nightwear and outerwear has brought together the warmth and comfort of knitwear, cashmeres and loose cottons with the indulgence of intimate accessories.
In the wake of this gentle revolution the emotional walls between assortment categorisation, and the physical walls of shop departmental planning have both come tumbling down.

Monsoon’s modernised spaces are open and inviting leading the customer from seasonal sweaters and winter warmth through an embracing central sanctuary of ever-present softness to the final temptation of accessories heaven, in a journey as seamless as the passing hours of a perfect day.

A significant commercial response to a subtle lifestyle change heralds in a new daywear dawn for both Monsoon & Accessorize.

 

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What’s happening in your sector?
How is your customer’s lifestyle evolving and are you adapting your proposition to maximise the commercial opportunities?

VM-unleashed constantly monitors best practice such as Monsoon and Accessorize, to provide the most up to date and best practice guidance for its clients.

Debenham’s Designer Diet: Fashion Food for Thought

Fashion week has stimulated the creative juices to flow through the hearts and veins of London’s window dressers and creative merchandisers.

 

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From monotone and monochrome to coordinated costumes and colour explosions the windows of the city vie for visual supremacy and a slice of the passing traffic.

More ingenious than most is the clever concept that sits inside the newly constructed windows of the refurbished Debenham’s on Oxford Street. Colour statements are created within a supermarket setting with mannequins wheeling painted trolleys through a series of colour cameos from Winter Greens and Sweet Pastels to Berry Pink and Blue Washes.

The backdrop shelves serve up an imaginative assortment of toned tins and packets; washing powder to jams, bay leaves to garden peas.

With fashion neighbours such as Selfridges, Debenhams has pulled out all of the supermarkets stops, propelling mass market down the aisle to the high alter of aspiration.

 

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VM-Unleashed monitors, benchmarks and celebrates best practice to provide the most relevant and expert analysis & conclusions.

Passion Fruit: Lululemon Squeezing Life to the Full

Shops don’t just sell and retailers don’t just retail in the passionate world of modern consumer brands.

 

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Talking the talk has moved to walking the walk and now to  dreaming the dream, where assortment and retail store portfolios are simply the essential baggage required for living the life of the brand.

Yoga inspired Lululemon is literally helping to turn the retail experience on its head. Inspired by a love of fitness technically driven specialist clothing has been developed in a clamour to escape from a world of clinging cotton and the tracksuit turmoil of traditional training. Disinterested staff have been reborn as brand ambassadors with fulfilling lives flirting between classes, blogging, teaching and inspiring inside the ideology that embraces Lululemon stores.

Witness an environment with changing rooms for engaging in exercise not trying on clothes, a water fountain for hydrating the body as well as the soul, and an adrenaline buzz that promises to perform something that scares you each day.

Rest assured, life is safe and fulfilling inside the holistic home that is Lululemon.

 

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