Shoppers walking in to te new Sears Grand store in Las Vegas know that it's a Sears. It says so on the door.
But they also sense that it's not a Sears.
There's an extra 75,000 or so square feet in the single-level space. There's fashion apparel smack in the middle of the store. There are pantry items, like cereal, milk and orange juice. Tools and hard goods have been moved to the back.
And there's a new feel and message, that this store is modern, friendly, family-oriented, fashionable, younger, more energetic. That it's a grand departure, not only from traditional Sears stores but also from other big boxes, department stores and mass merchandisers.
“Sears wanted to reintroduce itself to the consumer,” says Sherif Ayad, creative director at Pavlik Design Team (Fort Lauderdale, Fla.), the firm that helped Sears develop the concept. “It wanted to announce to women and children that this store did not only emphasize Craftsman tools and Kenmore appliances.” There are Sony electronics, Dockers pants, Nike gear and Kellogg's cereals.
It's a departure in another way. Sears Grand stores are not mall-based, as nearly all the traditional Sears stores have been. The site Sears chose for the Las Vegas store (the third in the series, after West Jordan, Utah, and Gurnee Mills, outside of Chicago) is away from the Strip, in a residential neighborhood filling up with young families.
The store is designed so that those young shoppers feel at home immediately inside the door. Front and center, literally, are the fashion offerings: women's apparel to the right of the single entrance, home fashions to the left of the door with young men's and junior's in an enormous oval pad in the middle.
Though the store is 160,000 square feet, it's wide and relatively shallow, so the perimeter walls and the back of the store do not feel so far away. That also gives the store broad frontage and plenty of visibility and access from the street.
Aisles are wide, sightlines are uncluttered, the ceilings are open and the neutral palette is in whites, grays and beiges. The eye-catching color comes from huge departmental graphics 8 feet high by 24-36 feet wide. There are no interior departmental walls, and the store builds up from the lower apparel fixtures in the front to hard goods along the perimeters.
“We designed this store from the inside out,” says Ayad. “We didn't create an architectural box and then try to figure out how to fill it. We started with the customer's shopping experience, analyzed and perfected that function, then built the store to accommodate it.”
A 16-foot-wide boulevard aisle runs across the store, with home improvement merchandise on one side, appliances on the other and a 150-foot mega-feature wall of electronics anchoring the center. Dramatic architectural proscenium frames cut across the store, giving structure and scale to the space, and landing in each departmental pad with branded elements, graphics and signage.
“It was important to emphasize all the national brands this store carries,” Ayad says.
Departmental signage wraps the exposed steel columns as part of the new wayfinding system. The signage is all in both English and Spanish, Sears' unambiguous announcement of its multiculturalism.
Lateral aisles radiating out from the central pad divide the store into quadrants, and the ones that feature apparel contain their own fitting rooms, so customers don't have to search for them.
Along the perimeter is the store's most cutting-edge fixture, a 16-foot warehouse-type rack system wrapping around the entire store. The top 8 feet contains graphics visible from around the store. The bottom 8 feet is a merchandised gondola system.
HID lamps hanging from the 24-foot ceiling provide plenty of ambient light. The accent lighting is brought down to shopper level by a series of 8-foot-by-8-foot aluminum grids that hover over each of the merchandise pads.
One of the design objectives was to reduce the ratio of the stockroom space, not an easy goal with a retailer that carries as many large appliances as Sears does. But by putting as much merchandise onto the sales floor as they did – and also building operating efficiencies into the handling of stock – they were able to meet that objective.
In trying to create its own unique niche, Sears spent a lot of time and effort on choosing the right name for this concept. “They wanted to make it clear,” says Ayad, “that this is not a discounter, not a warehouse store, not a department store.”
After running the name through countless brainstorming sessions and focus groups, Sears Grand was chosen. “It says, 'we're larger and we have more offerings.' ” says Ayad. “It sounds confident and assertive, but it doesn't abandon the name Sears, which after all is one of the most recognizable brand names in the country.”
Proscenium frames cut across the store, landing in each merchandise pad with branded elements and lifestyle graphics. All the signage is in English and Spanish, Sears' acknowledgement of the need to be multicultural.
Client: Sears, Roebuck & Co., Hoffman Estates, Ill.
Design: Pavlik Design Team, Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
Architect: S.A. Miro Inc., Denver
General Contractor: Big D Construction, Salt Lake City
Flooring: Crossville Porcelain, Crossville, Tenn.
Walls: Benjamin Moore Paint, Montvale, N.J.
Innovation Wallcovering, New York
Furniture: Steelcase, Grand Rapids, Mich.
HBF Furniture, Hickory, N.C.
David Edward, Baltimore
Keilhauer, Toronto
Custom Millwork: Quantum Fine Casework, Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
Lighting: Boyd Lighting, San Francisco
Photography: Dana Hoff, N. Palm Beach, Fla.