I’ve just got back from a trip to the US that included a sweltering week in New York. Not having taken a holiday for a while, it was interesting to experience retail purely as a customer, and to do so in the company of my wife and daughters...

A colleague recently sent me a presentation showing how the logic of the design and layout of Disneyland could be used in the design of computer games. It wasn’t much of a stretch to see how the same logic could be applied to shopping centres. ...

Details keep me awake at night. They whisper things in my ear and worm their way into my dreams.I really used to believe that the devil was in the details and as a result distanced myself from them and delegated all responsibility for them wherever p...

In my last post I discussed the feminisation of the retail marketplace and how gender roles are changing in the world of shopping. I quoted Paco Underhill who says that men’s status in the family is increasingly becoming that of “an exoti...

I recently was asked to give a presentation on feminising the in store experience. A relevant topic as women now account for 85% of all consumer purchases. For food this goes up to 93%. But it’s a more complex subject than meets the eye. ...

Three seconds is a long time in retail.  I recently attended an insightful, not to mention sobering, presentation by a company who performs eye tracking research. Eye tracking is essentially following where a customer’s eyes go to when the...

I just read a blog post that maintained that customers don’t care as much about brands as we designers and marketers think they do. Compared to, say, our family, our friends and the people we love and care about, brands come a fair way down our...

There’s a lot of talk nowadays about making the store experience more interesting and stimulating for increasingly discerning customers.

All Saints is a retail environment that could be described as part Dickensian London, part horror movie set.

In the shadow of Michael Jackson’s and Farah Fawcett’s passing last month, one of my old TV favourites also quietly passed away. Ed McMahon was Johnny Carson’s sidekick for many years and the voice of the famous “Heeeeere’s Johnny!”

When we talk cost control to retailers anywhere in the world, the wall that they all come up against is the cost of real estate.

Forrest Mars Senior invented M&M’s in the 1930’s after he saw Spanish Civil War soldiers eating chocolate pellets coated in a hard shell which prevented melting. Nowadays there is an M&M to cater for your every mood, including peanut, almond, mint, crunchy or plain chocolate. The basic model however comes in six colours, which are all the same shape and all taste the same.

Captain’s log, star date 230509. The dilithium crystals have taken a bashing and the crew is tired, homesick and homeward bound at last. Personally, I have another planet left to visit and am writing this from Shanghai, where I have an active project, the first in a chain of large format wine stores- think Dan Murphy’s with an added overlay of customer education and enhanced wow-factor.

Captain’s log, star date 160509. I’m halfway though the Westfield Study Tour on a plane between London and Berlin.

I’m off tomorrow on the Westfield Study Tour. It’ll be interesting to see first hand how the rest of the retail world is dealing with the GFC- what I expect to see is even greater rigour in execution (born out of desperation) in the USA, value presented with optimism in the UK, value combined with innovation in Berlin and wanton creativity in Tokyo. But I’ll report back as I go.