Reinvention key to ensuring retail destinations remain fit for purpose
Retail destinations must continuously reinvent to remain fresh, relevant and engaging for the people who visit says Russell Loveland, Senior Portfolio Director at Landsec.
3 minutes to read
A little over three years ago, Landsec saw the way retail was evolving and repositioned the Shopping Centre portfolio to focus on resilient and regionally-dominant destinations.
These assets demonstrate resilience even when times are tough by continuing to attract new brands, providing opportunities to add value and being places where a great experience can be curated for our guests.
To maintain these strong fundamentals means constantly reinventing our destinations to ensure the offer remains fresh, relevant and engaging for the people who visit.
This starts with the strength and breadth of the retail offer, ensuring that our brands are in the right space to provide a compelling offer.
This means proactive asset management to understand the space that brands require, then seeking opportunities and reinvesting in our assets to form that space.
In the last few months alone we have opened newly-created stores for Arket at Bluewater, River Island at White Rose, New Look at Trinity, Bershka at St David's and are in the process of delivering newly-formed space for Victoria Secret at Buchanan Galleries and Primark and JD Sports at Bluewater.
We know retail is only one part of a successful destination; a strong restaurant and leisure component tailored to the catchment is essential to the attractiveness of the centre.
At White Rose in Leeds we identified the need for a food and cinema offer to serve our loyal guests and move the positioning of the centre to a full day out experience. The leisure extension of six new restaurants, an IMAX Cineworld and new children's playground opened fully let this year.
"In this challenging environment the retail destinations that succeed will be the ones that dominate their catchment, continue to re-invent themselves and understand that the experience guests have at every level really matters."
At Bluewater it was a case of building on an already successful leisure offer with the conversion of under-utilised space to form a trampoline and climbing park operated by Gravity and an extension to the Showcase cinema to ensure a market-leading cinema experience was on offer for our guests.
When developing Westgate, we put the guest experience at the heart of the design. From smart parking that directs you to a free spot and knows your number plate to let you out if you have paid, to the creation of a roof terrace offering panoramic views and new exciting restaurants for the city. Each element of the centre is designed to ensure a brilliant day out.
Technology also has a part to play, not only as a direct revenue driver through digital advertising screens, but also allowing us to understand our guests better through analysis of phone and Wi-Fi data and our web based ‘share your thoughts’ feedback tool.
Innovation has allowed us to bridge the online and physical retail worlds at Bluewater by offering guests the ability to browse the retail offer on-line then move straight through to a shopping portal to purchase.
Finally, guests are seeking that extra reason to visit. We provide these reasons through 'everyday wonder' at our centres. Recent activity has seen an eight metre tall robotic T-Rex at Trinity, an indoor safari trail at Bluewater enjoyed by 38,000 people and daily drama performances at Westgate.
In this challenging environment the retail destinations that succeed will be the ones that dominate their catchment, continue to re-invent themselves and understand that the experience guests have at every level really matters.