‘Blended essentials’: Inside WHSmith’s new flagship retail concept

The Moodie Davitt Report: What is the significance of this new store for WHSmith?

Carl Cowling (CC): It’s a big store for us. We came up with the concept of a blended essentials shop a couple of years ago and put a store into Gatwick with a pharmacy, but this new facility at Heathrow has taken that a step further. Increasingly, consumers are looking for all the essentials in one place and we have been pretty good over the last few years about bringing together books, magazines, convenience and electrical accessories. This is the next step in the journey, bringing health and beauty into that.

Here, customers can come in and experience all of those essential categories. We have been working on this store now for over a year and the initial results have been really impressive. It’s quite hard to measure these things in the current circumstances but we can say that the spend per passenger has gone up markedly and at such an early stage that’s pretty pleasing.

Carl Cowling: A landmark opening for WHSmith

What are the highlights for you in terms of the store’s design, newness and experience?

CC: In terms of design experience, I think we have done health and beauty really well. We have brought those categories together in the space in the left-hand part of the store and it really stands out. It’s had a great reaction from customers; the feedback is that it is a nice journey through the store. I’m really pleased that it almost seems seamless. It doesn’t look like a collection of little stores within one big store, it’s got a really nice blended feel throughout and I’m pretty pleased with how we’ve done that.

And I think the external look of the store is pretty striking as well, with the LED signage outside a really big draw. I’ve been to many airports around the globe and I can’t recall seeing anything quite like that. I don’t think I’ve seen essentials done in such a good way in any airport.

One thing that stands out both visually and in terms of the offer is the destination section. How was this conceived?

Toby Kier (TK): We are trying to make sure all of our stores don’t look just the same, and the souvenir element is one way of achieving that. It’s Heathrow Airport, the Queen’s Terminal. We want to link it to that and to London, so that was our focus here.

A lot of passengers want the standard Union Jacks and Paddington Bears and that is all available but we wanted to move it forward. So our buying team has talked to London museums such as the British Museum and the V&A and we have got some fantastic creative products from sources like that.

We also have a new partnership with Carnaby Street-founded business We Built This City, which produces product ranges based on the work of London artists. From them, we have sourced store-exclusive items based on that kind of work. Rather than just supply familiar tourist souvenir items, which are great, we want to really update that and get people buying new products from us.

The feel of the souvenirs area is added to by an LED Big Ben, which chimes every 15 minutes. It all adds to the fun and the results are phenomenal so far.

Toby Kier: Moving the destination category forward

The feel of the souvenirs area is added to by an LED Big Ben, which chimes every 15 minutes. It all adds to the fun and the results are phenomenal so far.

CC: Often souvenirs can be seen as a bit tacky, but what we are offering is anything but tacky. It will be really interesting to see, as passengers pick up, how successful the souvenir element becomes. I think that is something that can be reimagined for other stores around the world.

TK: Every store is different and the souvenir offer needs to reflect the different passenger mixes at different airports. Heathrow has a very different passenger blend from say London Stansted or New York or Sydney. We have spent a lot of time and effort and resource to make sure that the souvenir offer of this store is tailored to the passengers in this location.

With 5,100sq ft you have plenty of space; how did you plan the flow of passengers and the 26 till points?

CC: Space is really important – it’s the main asset in an airport. Yes it might be a bit quieter now but it will get busy again. If you think about this terminal there are normally 9 million passengers coming through it in a year, so it’s very congested. So as much as we would love to have more space, we need to make sure we are very efficient in the space available to us.

In designing the zones we have created a lot more linear footage and that has worked well. But at the same time we have to be fixated on the passenger flow. If you think about the old way of having tills at the back of the store, if you have got a lot of new passengers walking into your store and lots trying to walk out through the same entrance/exit, it’s not a good experience. So we have started redesigning stores – starting at Gatwick – improving flow into the stores and back out into the terminal, which you can see in evidence here. The details are really important to make sure the passenger experience is as good as it can be.

TK: We have worked a lot on queues in our traditional stores and these newer layouts are great at getting the flow through. We have some busy stores where the tills are at the back and this is just not a great experience. If people walk past and are looking in and see a big queue – there is nothing more off-putting.

We are also working on some ideas around fast, frictionless payment, with the need accelerated by the COVID crisis – we have got an app that we are trying at the moment.

We have the potential of loading the app, scanning the barcode and you can walk straight out after paying through Apple Pay or similar. So here you could be in and out of the store in 20 seconds, paid. There’s a lot of business traffic here at Heathrow where time is really important and we were fixated on making sure there aren’t queues.

Might we see more stores like this in other airports?

CC: Absolutely. It has worked really well in Gatwick and it already looks like it is working very well here. When I think about our businesses in Australia, Asia and the Middle East I can see this sort of format store working incredibly well. So it’s something we will want to talk to all landlords about. We need to get the blended essentials under one roof.

We have several iterations now and we think we have a concept that looks like it’s one shop, feels like it’s one shop but actually has all those different elements of specialism. My view is that other airports will really like that concept and we will be able to go to them with the kind of numbers that show how well it’s doing in Gatwick, how well it is doing in Heathrow. We will have gone through all of our teething issues.

If I had the benefit of being able to bring international landlords here and show them this store – not simple in the COVID-19 climate! – I think there would be a lot of interest in being able to export the concept.