Time to Set Up Overseas?

HOW PORTABLE IS YOUR store format? Imagine for a moment that you are heading off to open a store in a new market. Is it enough to take what you do at home, find a unit of the right size and then fit it out in in the same manner as you usually do?

Well, perhaps. The arrival of Gymshark, the U.K.-based online fitness brand (it has a smattering of stores in its home country and a couple in the Netherlands), in Roosevelt Fields, N.Y., is a case in point. On the face of it, this is a nearly complete unknown entering a very large country. Except that it’s not. Gymshark is an online force both at home and overseas, and those who seek its wares are of an age and demographic where political boundaries may not actually mean a great deal, as long as a shopping website is in place.

No surprises then, perhaps, for Gymshark’s U.S. fans – it’s a case of IRL (as the signs in the brand’s physical stores rarely tire of pointing out), rather than staring at a laptop and the stores are, in effect, physical manifestations of a website, with all that this implies.

But what about those outfits for which IRL stores are the norm? Is it enough to put, say, the name of a retailer followed by the name of the location on the logo and hope that will this “localize” the offer. Probably not and the U.S. is in fact littered with examples of European brands that have failed to take into account the fact that not all markets and shoppers are the same.

Think hard and then a bit more before setting up shop half a world away from where you normally do business. Is it the right thing to do commercially? Or is it a matter of retail hubris that will end up costing you dear? Without naming names, a massive Australian DIY retailer that came to the U.K. a few years ago, having bought an existing chain, disappeared without a trace almost within a year (look it up, it’s very easy to find). All it had done was replicate almost exactly what it did Down Under. It was an expensive lesson in the need to think about what you do and where you do it. Things are not the same everywhere.