Sheffield Co-op in 1997

I’ve been sorting through some of my old photos recently – for old, read ’1990s’. Very few of them have much interest from a retail point of view, but then it was generally more usual in those days for me to take pictures of historic buildings and attractive landscapes, rather than of shops.

However, I did come across a couple of shots of Castle House, the now-closed Sheffield Co-op department store in Angel Street (click on the images to view them at larger size). Back in 1997, the iconic store was very much still open, and I remember going there to buy my first CD player (!) and having lunch upstairs in the cafe.

Sheffield Co-op in 1997

I can’t recall too much about the dining experience, but I have a recollection of the cafe being popular among Sheffield’s older residents, and (I think) featuring lots of trellis screens and artificial plants. Of course, even back then the shop had the faded charm and slightly peripheral location that seemed to go hand in hand with being a Co-op department store, and though it was no John Lewis, it was a nice shop to have in its own way.

As I’ve written before, in a blog about the fate of Co-op department stores nationally, Sheffield Co-op’s merger with United Co-op, which then merged in turn with the larger Co-operative Group, led to the inevitable closure of the Castle House store last year.

Though the store’s demise was deemed a ‘shock’ by the Sheffield Star newspaper, there was really little doubt that it would have to shut following the second merger – after all, the Co-operative Group had already pulled out of non-food in 2007, describing its loss-making department store operation as “a continuing major drain on our resources”.

Rather like the former Newcastle Co-op department store, where the old food hall remains in just a small part of an otherwise vacated building, I understand that the food floor in Sheffield’s Castle House is also still open, along with the city’s main post office, occupying what Chris Downer calls “one wall of a cavernous and strangely empty hall… now that its ‘parent’ store, the Co-op department store, is no more”.

Sheffield Co-op, photographed by Chris Downer on 27 April 2008 (the day after closure)

Though the 1960s building’s architecture is not to everyone’s taste, Pevsner’s architectural guide to Sheffield highlights its impressive granite frontage and internal cantilevered staircase, and its controversial listing, earlier this year, gives hope that a sensitive re-use might one day be found – provided, of course, that there is a retailer out there who would be willing and able to occupy what is a very large site.

Writing to the Star in June, “a group of ladies” supportive of the listing decision argue that the Sheffield Co-op department store should be “re-opened by a company to once again enjoy the interior and unique spiral staircase… and recreate the friendly department store as it once was”.

Perhaps this could be another opportunity for Vergo Retail, given its record in saving old Co-ops that are “important, longstanding retail features in the towns and cities that they serve”^{[broken link removed]}?

Thank you to Chris Downer for the use of the 2008 photograph of Sheffield Co-op, which is © Copyright Chris Downer and licensed for re-use under the CC BY-SA 2.0 Licence.

By the way, if anyone has a photograph of the building as it is now, I’d be pleased to feature it in this blog, and would obviously credit the photographer. Drop me a line if you can help!

Image by Zoran

I was quite chuffed, this morning, to have a short article on web usability published in The Journal. Much of what I wrote is, or at least should be, common sense: essentially, the need to understand what information your customers are looking for, and to give it to them in a way that is clear and engaging. Though the examples I used in the article related to tourism websites, the same principles apply across the board, including to retailers.

To be fair, many of those retailers with ecommerce sites have become increasingly adept at offering an easy and stress-free user experience. On the pure etail side, for example, Play.com’s clean, uncluttered interface makes it a pleasure to use – sometimes, it has to be said, more so than the increasingly complex Amazon.co.uk. Similarly, in more niche markets, many of the sites submitted to my Home Interiors Directory and Garden & Landscape Directory manage to combine a user-friendly online shop with a quirky and distinctive tone of voice.

Among those retailers that straddle both bricks and clicks, JohnLewis.com is particularly effective at conveying those brand values of space, quality and attention to detail that are similarly prominent within its stores. In contrast, I tend to find the Ikea website confusing to use, and normally end up heading to the physical store at MetroCentre instead.

Generally, though, I often find that it’s those retailers with simpler sites – providing basic information about the business, rather than e-commerce functionality – that would benefit most from an online revamp. So, using the example of department stores, how about some candidates for those retailers that I think are most or least effective at managing their basic online presence?

Fenwick website

One retailer whose website has always disappointed me is Newcastle-based chain Fenwick. Though the site’s content has been beefed up of late, and now provides core information about the company and its stores, its imagery and overall appearance is somehow cold and aloof; certainly, there’s no sense of the retail theatre that you get when paying a visit to its Newcastle flagship.

Williams & Griffin website

In contrast, the website for Williams & Griffin – a department store that Fenwick acquired in 2008 - conveys a much warmer and more engaging feel through its purple palette and use of colour photographs. Coverage of individual departments within the store is also more comprehensive than on its parent company’s site. Instead, Willie Gee’s main oversight is failing to tell us, anywhere on its home page or ‘about us’ section, where the store actually is. Thankfully, the ‘contact us’ page reveals that we can find Williams & Griffin in Colchester.

Bentalls website

Over to another Fenwick acquisition – this time Bentalls, in Kingston-upon-Thames and Bracknell – and yet another different set of brand imagery. The layout and content of the site is functional, but the overall look is cheaper and less slick than you might expect for a quality department store brand. Generic smiling women stock photos, an unreadable scrolling ticker, and – worst of all – an @btconnect.com email address (should you fancy the advertised cookery classes) all convey a less than professional image. Equally, the ‘copyright 2006′ tag and lack of any news stories give the impression of a site that is not lovingly maintained.

Beales website

If the Bentalls site conveys an image that seems at odds with its brand, Beales’ problem is that its site struggles to convey much of a personality at all. The home page is dominated – overwhelmed, even – by an enormous offers banner, yet the site gives only a limited feel for what it’s like to shop at a Beales store. Even the ‘about us’ page links to a ‘corporate statement’, its talk about ‘entry price points’, ‘trading policy’ and ‘assortments’ squarely aimed at shareholders rather than customers. Shoppers are unlikely to be wooed by the revelation that “value, at all levels of the market, plays an increasingly important part for our customers [sic] shopping basket”.

Encouragingly, we are promised a ‘new website’, ‘coming soon’ in autumn 2009; there’s even a countdown timer, helpfully informing us that the ’time until launch’ is ’34 days, 2 hours, 10 minutes and 26 seconds’. That’s undoubtedly good news, but it’s always a risky ploy to make such a big deal of an upcoming website revamp – not only are you building customers’ expectations about what they can expect in 34 days’ time (which is fine, assuming that the new site meets or exceeds those expectations), but you’re also effectively saying to shoppers that “we realise our current site isn’t very good”.

Lewis's website

One site that is too new to require a Beales-style makeover is that for the iconic Liverpool-based department store Lewis’s.  The Lewis’s site is largely effective, speaking with a distinctly local voice that successfully conveys the retailer’s independence and uniqueness. The site also celebrates the store’s heritage – with historic photos, and visitors invited to ‘submit their memories’ – at the same time as providing plenty of information about current and planned developments. If you were to pick fault, you might argue that the site sometimes has too much going on – for example, it might benefit from a little more white space, and less content disappearing off ‘below the fold’.

Rutherford & Co website

After so many niggles, we should probably end on a more positive note. One site that I particularly like is that for Rutherford & Co, an independent, family-owned department (or ‘lifestyle’) store based in Morpeth, in Northumberland. Where the Fenwick site fails to do the physical store justice, Rutherford & Co has packed its site with beautiful photographs that effectively convey the rich and quirky instore experience. “Welcome to the sumptuous world of Rutherfords”, the site’s home page declares, and – for once – it really does deliver on its promise.

Thank you to Zoran for making available the image used at the top of this post.

Looking towards the Co-op / Vergo / unnamed store in Carr Street, Ipswich. Photograph by Tim Marchant

Regular readers may recall my post from last month, where I queried how the former East of England Co-op department stores might be rebranded following their takeover by the Lewis’s of Liverpool owner, Vergo Retail.

One advantage of spending the last three years working as a market researcher is that I will now quite happily pick up the phone and speak to anybody. Equally, I have become pretty tenacious in digging around until I find out the answers to niggling questions. I thought, therefore, that I’d put these skills to the test.

A day or two ago, I picked up the phone and called – as you do – the former Co-op, now Vergo-owned, department store in Clacton-on-Sea, Essex. “I hope you don’t mind me asking a slightly unusual question”, I said to the very pleasant woman who answered, “but are you able to tell me what your store is now called?”.

“I don’t know!”, was the friendly response. “I’m not sure if it’s been decided yet. It might just be Vergo Clacton.”

So, not a huge leap further forward there. However, the very helpful woman advised that Vergo Retail’s head office might have the answer I was looking for. Conversations with two more very friendly ladies in Liverpool prompted similar responses; clearly the stores could no longer use the Co-op name, but my contacts did not think – beyond referring to the new shops as Vergo department stores – that an alternative brand had been decided upon.

How much less complicated things were with Vergo’s earlier acquisitions in the South West, where the Plymouth Co-op department store already had a brand – Derrys – that was distinct from its Co-op identity, and all that needed to be done was to remove all the Co-op cloverleaf logos.

For now then, the branding of the former East of England Co-op stores still seems to be in flux. However, given the number of searches for ‘Vergo Retail’ – and even ‘Vergo Retail rebrand’! – that are showing up in my blog stats, I can take some solace from the fact that I’m not the only person who’s curious!

Thank you to Tim Marchant for the use of the photograph of Carr Street in Ipswich, which is © Copyright Tim Marchant and licensed for re-use under the Creative Commons Licence.

Union Street frontage of former Esslemont & Macintosh store, Aberdeen

When I wrote about Vergo Retail’s recent acquisitions a few days ago, it brought to mind the photographs that I took back in February this year of the former Esslemont & Macintosh (E&M) department store in Aberdeen’s Union Street.

When Owen Owen fell into administration in March 2007, E&M was the only one of its four stores not to be saved. Indeed, by the time Vergo Retail stepped in to buy the others – Robbs in Hexham, Joplings in Sunderland and Lewis’s in Liverpool – in May 2007, the administrators had already closed E&M’s doors for good, with no buyer able to be found in time.

It was a sad and sudden end for a store that had enjoyed a long history, established in 1873 when Peter Esslemont and William Macintosh merged their businesses into one. For over 130 years, the store had remained in the ownership of the Esslemont family, the connection only ending when E&M was sold to Owen Owen in 2005. At the time, company chairman Pauline Esslemont suggested that “being within the Owen Owen group will strengthen E&M’s position as the pre-eminent department store in Aberdeen”, highlighting the challenges that it already faced as as independent store within a competitive city centre.

When I visited Aberdeen in February, I was naturally curious to see what had become of the E&M building. The answer – not very much, or at least not yet.

Former Esslemont & Macintosh store, Aberdeen

Even though the store was boarded up, it was nice to still be able to see some of the architectural detail, notably the mosaic fascia spelling out the business’s name.

Former Esslemont & Macintosh store, Aberdeen

Detail of mosaic fascia, Esslemont & Macintosh, Aberdeen

Pleasingly, there are plans to bring the property back into use as a hotel, with the architects’ visualisations suggesting that the mosaics may be retained as a reminder of the building’s past life. Though E&M may be no more, that would seem a neat way of recognising and celebrating the store’s significance to Aberdeen’s retail history.

John Lewis Bristol. Photograph by Mattbuck4950

Perhaps it’s a reflection of my status as a retail nerd that one of the first things I usually do on Friday mornings is check out the John Lewis Partnership’s ‘Weekly Figures’.

These weekly stats are strangely compelling in that – probably uniquely for a major UK retailer – John Lewis publishes a store-by-store breakdown for its eponymous department store chain. Hence, as well as finding out today that overall sales in the last week were up an impressive 5.3% on a year ago, we also get to see which stores have been doing particularly well over the last seven days (High Wycombe, up 15.1%), and which ones are looking a bit less healthy (Edinburgh, down 9.1% on a year ago).

Giving a picture of slightly longer-term trends, the comparisons given for the current half-year, rather than just the last week, tend to be more insightful. These remind us just how challenging John Lewis’s trading was between February and April – even after what is now 13 successive weeks of positive figures compared to 2008, Cambridge is still the only physical store to have enjoyed better sales (up 1.5%) over the current 24-week period than it did during the same stretch a year ago.

In contrast, it’s interesting that John Lewis’s worst performing store over the last 24 weeks has been John Lewis Bristol at the out-of-town Mall at Cribbs Causeway, where sales are down a whole 12.5% compared to last year. Bristol, of course, has seen some major retail changes over the past year, the new Cabot Circus development transforming the city centre with its opening of 120 stores – including a relocated House of Fraser and a new Harvey Nichols. One must guess that the new competition from Cabot Circus is, at least to some extent, accounting for John Lewis Bristol’s relatively poor performance.

The fortunes and associated stories of John Lewis Bristol are an interesting illustration of the cyclical nature of retail development. The store’s history goes back to 1980, when it took over the landmark building at Broadmead – adjoining what is now Cabot Circus – that had previously housed Lewis’s Ltd (no relation).

Fast forward to 1994 and John Lewis’s announcement that it was going to vacate that store – in favour of anchoring the shiny new out-of-town Cribbs Causeway mall – inevitably left future prospects for the city centre looking gloomy. After all, losing its John Lewis store is, possibly, any city centre’s worst nightmare.

Since John Lewis moved out in 1998, its old premises have had a rather chequered history. The independent Kingston-based department store chain, Bentalls, had already agreed, in 1995, to take over the building upon John Lewis’s departure – not, in hindsight, one of the better decisions in British retail history. After an expensive refurbishment, Bristol’s Bentalls store only lasted for two years, making an estimated £20m loss in the process – presumably thanks to shoppers flocking to John Lewis at Cribbs Causeway instead.

Though Bentalls managed to dispose of its Bristol store to House of Fraser in 2000, the ill-fated experience left the overall business weakened, paving the way for Newcastle-based Fenwick to snap up the remaining Bentalls stores in 2001 – perhaps something to talk about in more detail in a future blog post.

In its turn, House of Fraser announced in 2005 that it too would be moving out, this time to anchor Cabot Circus, with Primark stepping in to fill the void. With House of Fraser’s new store opening at the end of 2008, the old Lewis’s building will once again come back to life when Primark finally opens the doors next month to its biggest store outside London’s Oxford Street.

Given the property’s status as something of a barometer of Bristol’s changing retail fortunes, it’s a nice touch that the building is going to retain a visual reminder of its fascinating history. Given Primark’s seemingly unstoppable success though, it seems likely that its stay may be a little longer than some of its predecessors.

Thank you to Mattbuck4950 for the use of the photograph of John Lewis Bristol, which is © Copyright Mattbuck4950 and licensed for re-use under the Creative Commons Licence.

Co-op Department Store, Great Yarmouth, prior to Vergo Retail's takeover. Photograph by Stephen McKay

In the last couple of weeks, one interesting news story that has been easy to miss is the takeover of the East of England Co-op’s department store business by Vergo Retail.

Vergo Retail, as you may be aware, is the Liverpool-based operation headed by David Thompson that, in 2007, rescued Lewis’s of Liverpool, Joplings of Sunderland and Robbs of Hexham from the brink of closure after Owen Owen, the previous owner, had gone into administration.

Reports suggest that Vergo Retail has been doing rather well since then. Certainly, the business has been performing well enough to snap up the non-food operation of the Plymouth & South West Co-operative Society^{[broken link removed]} (PSWCS) in February this year, including the Derrys department store in Plymouth and four additional Homemaker stores in Devon and Cornwall; and well enough to double the size of the business again, just a couple of weeks ago, with the acquisition of twelve East of England Co-op shops. This latest acquisition includes department stores in Norwich, Ipswich, Colchester, Clacton-on-Sea and Great Yarmouth, as well as six home stores in Felixstowe, Stowmarket, Clacton, Stanway, Dovercourt and Witham, and a standalone jewellery store in Colchester.

These developments are notable for various reasons, not least in being illustrative of the extent to which the UK’s consumer co-operative movement as a whole has recently been seeking to exit the non-food sector. A critical milestone in this respect was the Co-operative Group’s decision, in 2005, to close or sell its 36 department stores; here in the North East, this resulted in the closure of landmark stores in Gateshead, Newcastle, Chester-le-Street and elsewhere, while a few others – including Bishop Auckland, Blyth and (briefly) Berwick-upon-Tweed – became part of Anglia Regional Co-operative Society’s Westgate Department Stores business.

Co-op department store, Tamworth

The impact of the Co-operative Group’s exit from department stores has been significant. First, it has created challenges for those (dwindling number of) independent co-operative societies that remain – such as East of England and, in my parents’ home town, Tamworth Co-op – requiring them to source new suppliers and renogotiate with existing ones, while having to work increasingly hard to maintain gross margins. Second, it has meant that for any societies seeking to merge with the larger Co-operative Group – such as United Co-op in 2007, and PSWCS in 2009 – prior disposal or closure of their department stores has essentially been a prerequisite.

Vergo Retail’s recent moves are therefore significant in that they seem to offer unloved and unwanted Co-op department stores a lifeline - as non-Co-op department stores. In the east of England, there can be little doubt that many of the now-saved stores would have closed had Vergo not stepped in - yet they are all shops that have a loyal clientele; that perform an important function within their respective communities; and that, with some dynamic management and a little investment, could once again be highly successful. Indeed, as Vergo expands its empire, its ability to secure improved supplier terms – and offer better deals to customers – will be enhanced; the very opposite situation to that faced by the few remaining co-operatives with non-food interests.

What is interesting, from a historical point of view, is that I can think of no precedent where Co-op department stores have been acquired, as going concerns, by a non-co-operative retailer; rather, if you were to go back to the 1950s and earlier you would see the process happening in reverse, with independent department stores - such as Newcastle’s Henry A Murton’s in Grainger Street^{[broken link removed]} – being acquired by local co-ops.

Vergo Retail's established Robbs of Hexham store

Going forward, much will depend of course on whether Vergo can successfully turn around the mostly loss-making stores that it has acquired; however, the company’s apparent success in reinvigorating Lewis’s, Joplings and Robbs (no-one can forget the sad, plundered interior of Robbs in the days leading up to its aborted closure) bodes well. For me, though, the burning question – and one that I cannot find either asked or answered anywhere else – is how will Vergo rebrand its newly acquired stores in Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex? After all, a store that is no longer a co-operative can barely be called a ‘Co-op Department Store’.

It will be interesting to see whether Vergo comes up with some locally-inspired names, or whether – in House of Fraser style – it seeks to bring some brand consistency to its growing portfolio. Lewis’s of Clacton, anyone?

Thank you to Stephen McKay for the use of the photograph of Great Yarmouth’s Co-op (now Vergo) department store, which is © Copyright Stephen McKay and licensed for re-use under the Creative Commons Licence.

Tesco in Eger, Hungary

How about starting off with this very large (and seemingly very successful) Tesco on the outskirts of Eger in Hungary? The planners would never allow letters that big on a UK Tesco Extra.

And what about admiring the Tesco department store – spread over several floors – in Košice, Slovakia?

Tesco in Košice, Slovakia

I’ve probably got some more eastern European Tesco shots somewhere, if anyone is really interested… go on, say you are! :)