A brief to develop a new concept for a high street home and lifestyle store. We designed a complete presentation to enable an accurate cost and visualise the concept to raise finance.

The overriding concept was for a legitimate experience, inviting, tactile, and storytelling. Informative, aspirational and inspirational, a physical showroom for stock to back up the online store excelling in delivery and customer service.

The Home Food hall features a bar and refectory area named The Kitchen to serve the local community through the day.

Produce available is seasonal, locally sourced and organic with transparent provenance.

Boots briefed us to take a strategic long term view of the planning of their larger stores to create the ultimate health and beauty mass high street retailer.

We began by visiting large Boots stores and auditing their current store models before creating a new layout for the stores of the future with the emphasis on added retail.

Generally we found that although a major retailer with a long high street heritage, Boots was not really thinking like a modern retailer. We created a better planned store including an orientation zone with product discovery areas, simpler customer walkways and a more departmental approach with better, more appropriate adjacencies encouraging cross merchandising, browse shopping with the ultimate aim of increasing basket spend.

We illustrated this new planning strategy with plans and diagrams, detailing product adjacencies including product development areas, as well as three dimensional walkthrough visuals, based on real stores, to show how target customers would shop the new store. Underpinning this planning strategy we created a system of customer maps using Boots marketing data to show how customers would traverse the store and produced a defining statement for the store of the future.

A strategic ‘brand architecture’ project to underline the retail aspect of Mothercare through redefined lifestages. To illustrate these lifestages we produced a series of concept drawings and computer models to show what the new brand architecture would look like in a true retail situation.

The brand architecture included product evaluation to illustrate potential growth areas for Mothercare.

As part of our work in 2004 and 2005 with Littlewoods Shop Direct Group, we developed a new style, new thinking, a new proposition, quality standards, benchmarking using key performance indicators along with a new design to breathe new life into the Littlewoods brand to make it able to compete in the modern home shopping market.

The first step in this modernisation process was a revamped and reworked Littlewoods Home Shopping Catalogue.

We spent 14 months working hand in glove with the Littlewoods Shop Direct Group design department to improve and implement a common working methodology between the Liverpool and Manchester offices before the move to the new group head office in Speke, Liverpool.

We worked across all home shopping brands and support brands to develop a modern, holistic design solution for the business.

Key projects included: Briefing the Business, Streamlining the Process, Brand Architecture, (product development areas combined with running order for the main books), Customer Profiling, Defining Quality Standards, Extra Catalogue Activity (ECA) critique and design templates, Brand DNA for all Home Shopping brands, Brand Alignment, Fashion and Design Trends, Photography Quality Standards and Art Direction, as well as numerous and varied large and small projects along the way.