Opening Your Fifth Store … On the Same Street

Spanish fashion giant Zara opened another store on London’s Oxford Street and it looks pretty good. But hold on a moment, isn’t this the retailer’s fifth store on the strip? Even for a thoroughfare that’s about a mile long, filled with shoppers along almost its entire length, this does sound a little excessive.

Maybe, but the powers that be at Zara seem to think it makes perfect sense to open another flagship (just how many flagships can a retailer have?) on this street and that it won’t run the risk of cannibalizing sales from the other stores. The process is actually mirrored in Manhattan, where H&M must be close to being crowned the “King of Cheap Fashion,” given the number of stores it has in the area.

At Zara’s new 61 Oxford St. outpost, it has niche marketed the specific location in terms of both the offerings and its design. Zara’s architects claim the store has a greater appeal to the younger shopping crowd, with “industrial” elements incorporated to complement the rather gritty ambience of the east end of Oxford Street.

Indeed, steel, black metal and hard floors all make this store’s interior slightly edgier than a typical Zara, and when coupled with a heavily glazed exterior, the overall impression is of difference. Judging by the number of people passing through its entrance, the fact that there are four other Zara stores on Oxford Street seems not to matter.

The best retailers respond to location, and while a global rollout can achieve the economies of scale, each store should still be treated as a discrete project. Time to raise a(nother) glass of Cava to a Spanish retailer that knows what it needs to do to keep shoppers interested and the tills ringing.    

John Ryan is a journalist covering the retail sector, a role he has fulfilled for more than a decade. As well as being the European Editor of VMSD magazine, he writes for a broad range of publications in the U.K., the U.S. and Germany with a focus on in-store marketing, display and layout, as well as the business of store architecture and design. In a previous life, he was a buyer for C&A based in London and then Dusseldorf. He lives and works in London.