Retail’s Strange Bedfellows

Invention creates strange bedfellows if the current crop of retail alliances are anything to go by. Take a look at London’s Oxford Street at the moment and you’ll find that Irish discount fashion retailer Primark has space in the very upscale department store Selfridges, as part of its “Denim Studio.”

It does help, of course, that both of these retailers are owned by the Canadian Weston family, but nonetheless, they are not the first thing that a retail strategist would recommend yoking together.

And then, last week came news that Danish food discounter Netto, which is not unlike Trader Joe’s in the U.S., is to join forces with U.K. mid-market grocery giant Sainsbury’s in a move that almost nobody had predicted.

Both of these are probably instances of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts and of putting those parts together equating to square pegs in round holes.

So perhaps the question that needs to  be answered is how many people in retail dream up what might appear to be highly eccentric solutions when thinking about what to do next. And the answer is, very few. If it were that easy, then most retailers would already have done something of the kind and unusual alliances would be the norm in most shopping locations. 

Yet, one of the hallmarks of unusual combinations is that they have the capacity to make the shopper stop, stare and consider the individual merits of both elements and the way in which they have been conjoined.

It seems reasonable to suggest, therefore, that when looking at store design, one of the more interesting approaches might be to go and look not at what the competition is doing, but at what’s happening out in left field and how this might be profitably incorporated within your organization.

Truly, strange retail bedfellows produce unusual offspring … and sometimes they are captivating.

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.