The Big Get Bigger … And Better

Voted the best department store in the world for the third time in a row by industry leaders and executives at the Global Department Store Summit, Selfridges on London’s Oxford Street goes from strength to strength. And by anyone’s standards, this is a very big shop, although not on the scale of New York’s Macy’s Herald Square. The point, however, is that hot on the heels of receiving what some might consider the ultimate department store accolade, Selfridges has unveiled plans to extend its accessories floor space by 25,000 square feet.

This isn’t that much in the scheme of things, but the intention is that all of this additional space will be devoted to handbags and that the London Ladies who Lunch will be in a position to browse a category area covering 50,000 square feet. This will cost £300 million, or around $500 million in your shiny New World money, which seems like a lot, this side of the Pond, anyway.

It will also make this the London destination if you are female (or maybe male?) and are in the mood for picking up this season’s Chanel or Louis Vuitton number, to make sure that your friends know your husband/partner really cares. And even if he doesn’t or maybe you’ve actually bucked the received wisdom and shelled out for it yourself, Selfridges understands that when it comes to departmental store clout, size matters.

This is a retailer that has not stood still for more than a decade and there is, more or less, something different, a new department or a remodelled floor, pretty much every time you wander in.

As such, it keeps giving shoppers additional reasons to come in and that, perhaps, is why it has managed to maintain its “best” laurels over an extended period. It appears that continual reinvention, rather than sporadic refits, is the best way to ensure that when it comes to keeping your store in the spotlight, you are in the vanguard.  

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.