Picture this: You’re in a fancy department store, and you’ve wandered into the homewares department. Your shopping mission is bedding. You need new sheets, pillowcases and, if it feels right, a mattress. All easy, apart from the last bit. Until you actually put your head down, get a substantial amount of shut-eye and then wake up again, you’ll not really know how effective or comfortable the mattress you’ve bought actually is.
An end to this awkward dilemma could be in sight, in London at least. Department store operator John Lewis has opened “The Residence” at its Oxford Street flagship, and the big idea is that you can have a sleepover in a major store while test-driving some of the products. Okay, the mattress you are going to sleep on costs around £2000 (around $2700 at current exchange rates), and for most of us, this is probably price-prohibitive, but you do get some say on the sheets you lie on, the thread count, and so on. And there’s dinner, which is served at a ritzy-looking table in this bijou “apartment.”
Only one mild issue: Before retiring, you might wish to “use the bathroom,” as you Americans coyly refer to it. The Residence has a bedroom, a sitting-cum-dining room, but there is no bathroom. Instead, the concierge will take you to the store’s “lavatories,” so crisis averted. All this, and you get to shop the store for an hour after it closes.
This is only taking place over the next four Saturdays, initially at least. To get access to this completely free treat, you need to be one of the lucky few chosen from a ballot – if you get through. The Residence is on the store’s third floor, and while it will earn John Lewis no money directly (well, they might sell a few sheets), it will put them top of mind for shoppers in the market for bedding and will garner more than a few column inches. It is also yet another instance of creating an in-store experience that really is an experience. Think hard. Wouldn’t you want to do this?
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 Düsseldorf, Germany. He lives and works in London.