Umbrella Design 

Umbrella is a retail design consultancy that specialises in helping budding brands achieve retail dominance. Since its launch 25 years ago, owner Mark Fanthorpe and his team have been instrumental in helping companies like Benefit and Bare Escentuals go from the new kids on the block to some of the biggest brands operating in the UK today.

The Challenge

Umbrella knew that it needed to raise its profile if it wanted to grow but didn’t feel it had the content to satisfy the media in the long-term.

“We spoke to a number of PR companies, all of whom wanted to take us down the news route. We didn’t feel that they understood us or what we wanted to achieve,” Mark Fanthorpe, owner, Umbrella.

The Result

While we still do the odd press release, the main focus of our work with Umbrella is to share the experience that Mark and his team have gained over the last 20 years and offer advice that helps retail brand owners to overcome the challenges they are facing today. In doing so Mark has built a good reputation as an industry expert and his opinion is regularly covered in the media.

By focusing on thought leadership rather than news we are not counting column inches but usually pages of coverage.

“Rather than concentrate on news, 9mm got under the skin of Umbrella and enabled us to see our company through the eyes of our customers. They helped me to realise that my experience had value and that people would be interested in what I had to say. Every month we get coverage in a key media and I’m asked to take part in roundtables and speak at conferences attended by our prospects.”

“The coverage has been very influential in new business meetings and in generating new leads into the company,” said Mark.

We spend a lot of money on shop fits. How can we ensure that stores are designed so that we get a good return on this investment?

In retail as in life there are no guarantees but you can stack the deck in your favour. The number one rule is ‘know your customer’. To be successful you must create an experience that connects with people on an emotional level. Your goal is to build an environment that your target customer will feel good in and helps to tell the story of the product. Get this right and you will produce a positive commercial response.

The Apple store is a wonderful example of this. This is a shop that knows the emotion it wants to create and the story it wants to tell. The store produces the wonder of an art gallery. Each product is exhibited as if it is a masterpiece. Apple makes products on a massive scale, yet you walk out feeling as if you have purchased something special and unique to you.

The product must also deliver on its promise. Good design can help sales soar but nothing can help a bad product.

A word to the wise; don’t be seduced by the creative elements of your business or by the designers you employ to develop them for you. There is nothing wrong with creativity as long as it is controlled by profitability. Retail design is a function of business, it’s not fine art.

Know the return you want to achieve. You don’t have to spend a fortune to get great results. Have a view of where you want to be in 5 years time; how many stores; how many staff; number of product lines, etc. Know where you are going so that you can budget each step effectively to get there. You don’t want to get to the end of your shopfit to find you don’t have any money left for the next stage in your growth.

DO IT YOURSELF SHOP FITS

Mark Fanthorpe, managing director of Umbrella looks at how budding retail entrepreneurs can infiltrate the high street

The retail sands are shifting and the high street is once again in a state of flux. Established players are being forced out by the Internet creating an opportunity for shops that can deliver a more specialised shopping experience. If you are a budding retail entrepreneur, there has never been a better time to infiltrate the high street.

Today’s shopper is a more discerning breed. Yes we all like the convenience of a supermarket or a shopping mall but we also like to see ourselves as an individual and that individuality is not that well catered for. Big brands buy on scale to get their costs down and this has led to a uniformity of experience from one outlet to the next, locally and globally.

Your aim is to attract the sniper shopper; people that will go out of their way to get to a shop that caters for their specific, individual needs. It might be something specialised, like a guitar or bike shop. It might be based around foods such as breads, cheese or meats or it might present a fashion item that appeals to a specific type of person, for example the more environmentally inclined. Whatever it is, the experience must speak to the audience on a personal level.

Getting there doesn’t have to cost the earth and shouldn’t. If you are prepared to get your hands dirty, you can create a retail experience that delivers a healthy commercial result, without spending a fortune. All you need to be successful is a passion for your product and a good understanding of your target market.

When considering the creation of your DIY shop, there are four key elements to take into account:

Location

My advice; latch onto the high street in the cheapest way possible. Don’t be seduced into thinking that you have to be near the big brands. Retail chains are looking to capture the casual shopper, the passing traffic that doesn’t have a specific destination in mind.

The successful niche shop doesn’t rely on capturing the impulse purchaser, but instead creates focused campaigns that generate word of mouth amongst their target market. Your must become a destination shop.

Budget

Always be mindful of your budget. Be realistic about how much you can spend setting up and stick to it. Do not allow yourself to be seduced into being too creative or you might find that you spend more than you need to. Your job, at least at first, is to save as much money as possible, not spend it. Put profitability before creativity.

Shop fit

You are in a theatrical business and have to create an experience that sets the stage for your products that ultimately produces the right emotional connection with your customers. Shop fits are expensive. You should focus on making the product the star attraction.

I like to think of this as visual merchandising or the dressing of the product. The question is how to dress the product so that it gets the best reaction from the customer.  If I was starting out, I would be looking for help from that one person who understands my market and what is important to them.

Your goal is to create a shop that your customer will feel good in and helps to tell the story of the product. The shop needs to look like it has been created specifically for your market. If I am selling shoes to Oxford Dons, then perhaps I want a nice leather sofa and then lots of books around the room, making it look like somewhere that a Don might feel comfortable in.

Camper does this well. I remember when they had a sign out front which said that the shop was under refurbishment. When you went in, there was the product on upturned boxes. It gave the product an earthier feel which works with a brand that is a little left of centre and attracts people that have more organic, environmental values and leanings

Staff                                                                                                         

The person behind the counter should also take a starring role.  It is their job to extend the emotional shopping experience. Take a cheese shop for example. Imagine the assistant offers you a piece and tells you that it’s Shropshire Blue. He says that the person who makes it has been doing so for over 60 years and the recipe has been in the family for over 200 years. The cows that they use are a rare breed with only 3 legs. It also has a very distinctive flavour because oranges are added to their diet. So you try it thinking, blimey, orange eating, three legged cows that’s got to be interesting and you get this great orange flavour.

You are not just buying into the cheese that you are eating, but also the history of it. You are buying into the romance of the product. You conjure up this image of a man with gnarled old features, a master cheese maker. In reality it’s probably not like that in any way at all but you let your emotion do the buying for you. All the guy has done is offered you a bit of cheese and told you a story about three legged cows and some oranges.

Be sassy, be different but always be true to your customer. Don’t try and emulate the big boys. We have been through a period of centralisation and consolidation. We have seen chain stores and franchises come into dominance. Now we are seeing a movement back to specialist shops, be they grocers, butchers or specialist equipment stores.

These shops are unlikely to turn into retail giants but if you capture a fair sized niche, you can turn a decent profit.

Mark Fanthorpe has over 25 years of experience helping budding brands achieve retail dominance through design. He can be found blogging at www.umbrelladesign.co.uk

Flights of Fantasy Vs Commercial Realism Or How to Avoid Being Seduced by Your Designer

A mistake that I often see up and coming brands make when developing their shop fits is to put too much emphasis on creativity.

Here’s the thing…our ability to be creative means that we can make your dream a reality but it is your vision that makes our designs successful.

In my experience, problems start because people who don’t necessarily see themselves as overly creative tend to give us arty folk way too much credit. Usually this is because they don’t really understand what we do and don’t feel capable of doing it themselves.

So they end up giving away creative control and allow themselves to be seduced by people who appear to know what they are talking about and seem to have their best interests at heart. In doing so they risk losing touch with their own vision and the vital balance between creativity and what is going to work commercially.

Be careful. Some creative people like to play the seduction game.

The seduction process usually begins the moment you meet with someone from a design agency. That person has been chosen specifically because of their power to seduce. They are extremely confident individuals whose ability to wax lyrical about colours, materials, textures and finishes is second to none.

The problem is that all too often the seducers are more interested in their own personalities and seduction technique than they are in the client. Their eye is not on what is commercial but on winning awards that will bring in bigger and better clients with much larger budgets.

It’s also easy for some designers to get carried away by their own creative impulses or create an impossible dream for the client because they feel that is what they need to do to win the business.

This approach ultimately results in shop fits that are unnecessarily expensive to produce, inappropriate for the intended space or do not create the connection with the target market needed to deliver the desired commercial result

I’ve been called in on numerous occasions by contacts who want a second opinion on their agency’s ideas and it amazes me how some client’s allow their designers to take them down roads that are simply counter-commercial.

History has taught me that the clients who get the best out of their design agency are those that have the clearest vision of what they want. These people will be the first to admit that putting pen to paper and translating what is in their heads onto the page is not a strong point. But then that is why they come to us.

What they do have in spades, is a very strong commercial sense of what is going to work. After all they will have already done a lot of the hard work. They’ll have developed their range. They’ll have researched their customers; who they are and what they want. Most importantly they’ll have identified what their budget is.

It is then our job to take all of these essential elements and use our creative powers to turn their vision into a reality. We may suggest tweaks that help to create a uniqueness and an individuality. Or if their budget doesn’t quite stretch to everything they want, we are there to provide solutions to make it work and offer best case scenarios.

What we certainly don’t do is control the process. You and your vision do.

Your vision is where the commercial seeds are sown because your idea is informed by the research that you have done into your target market. You should be having a commercial discussion from the outset so that we can tailor our response to your objectives. The better our understanding of your commercial imperatives, the better our response will be.

Remember, you don’t have to spend a fortune to get great results.

Mark Fanthorpe has over 25 years of experience helping budding brands achieve retail dominance through design. He can be found blogging at www.umbrelladesign.co.uk

SMALL BUT PERFECTLY FORMED: HOW LESS CAN GIVE YOU MORE

There’s a school of thought that says bigger is better. In retail, this makes a lot of sense. Hence the flagship stores and large concessions that dominate the high streets and department stores of Central London. However, there is an equally strong argument for the less is more approach. Especially during a tough retail market.

Take any successful brand. They typically grow their presence to the point of saturation. As the market saturates so growth slows, no matter how many new products the R&D guys come up with. But as growth curves begin to flat line, investor pressure for further growth continues to increase.

What’s often forgotten is the long-tail of loyal customers and target demographic that live outside traditional catchment areas. Although the cost of building a Londonesque presence is prohibitive, it doesn’t mean that there aren’t decent returns to be made for the savvy brand owner.

One route that is proving successful for Benefit is to put small but perfectly formed pods in remoter Boots outlets that serve pockets of their ideal customer. These Hot Pods remain true to the brand’s distinct values but do not require an expensive shop fit to build or a consultant to run. Instead they carry a selection of best sellers that fulfill the customer’s immediate needs.

For growing brands, it’s common practice to build a presence in an outlet that already has a loyal customer base to drive the visibility and credibility needed to be successful. When approaching a department store, however, it is not always necessary to go straight in for an expensive concession. Sometimes a more demure presence can deliver excellent results.

Bare Escentuals’ early relationship with Debenhams provides a good example of how to do this. To capture the busy Christmas market, the company introduced Hot Pods into Debenhams that offered starter-kits. These beautifully packaged gifts not only offered a great present but also a high impact intro to the brand for new customers.

Remember, like many things in life, it’s not the size that counts but what you do with it. Looking smaller is no time to scrimp on production values. You need to make an impact and the customer still has to be able to follow the brand story. Likewise it must be visible. Location is just as important a factor for a small presence as it is for a large one. If not more so.