Welcome to the C & E Townhouse

For the last year as part of the overall Experience Strategy, I have been thinking about what it means to be in physical retail right now. This all started with some very basic questions I wanted to be able to answer: Why have stores? What’s their role in comparison to other touch-points? What would change if we had to charge £10 to cross the threshold? Why would anyone care?

On stage at Retail Week Live in March, I had mentioned some of this thinking and it led to brilliant conversations about further exploration. I felt it was the right direction. The early part of the year was spent researching.

I went further upstream. The legacy model itself from the 20th Century – retail as distribution node. I looked at every part of the interaction model and questioned it in the simplest of terms. What if we didn't have to do certain things? What is we chose to do things differently?

This is a conversation that is very current in every size and shape of retailer. Or should be very current. It is a hard conversation to have. As an advisor on Retail Week Live for next year, its something that is a constant subject for discussion.

 I’ve very proud of the Townhouse, how it came about, the reason it exists, the approach taken to create it, the approach to test and learn being taken. As I continually say, its about being digital not doing digital. Following is a condensed view of the last 8 months.

Very shortly, the new C&E Townhouse is fully opening in Islington, North London. Soft launch for a week or so now, then after a few tweaks and final additions as they arrive, fully open.

The start.

Before a brief was written, I wrote a two-page narrative which told the story of why and how of the space. The brief fleshed out the story and sought to explore the ‘what’.

But who to give the brief to? My background means that I like to find alternative routes to get to the right creative answer. This meant not using a store design agency. Simple when you realise you don’t want a ‘traditional’ store.

We partnered with Sebastian and Brogan Cox, a brilliant modern English furniture and design studio hidden in South East London. The idea of the London terraced house had been floated as an underlying concept. This simple idea played on the heritage of C&E and gave a nod to John Evelyn the namesake of the company.  

But why a house?

We became really interested in the social aspects of being in a place. Being centered in a location. In a community. We thought about how that would work.

Explorers for Growth is a key theme for C&E. It’s a modern update on ‘Explore Everything, Keep the Best’, and lends itself to all manner of interesting destinations: exploration through product, through nature and botany, through travel, through well being, through connecting with others, their work, their interests etc.

With that in mind, we literally needed a ‘home’ for all those things to be able to take place. Our London heritage works with the idea of a terraced house beautifully.

A home is about relationships.

A retail store has many KPIs. All manner of joy. We started at the end. We wanted to create a space that would encourage relationships. That would encourage local participation on an on-going basis.

Too often retail is placed in a location without much emotional intelligence. It’s all hard metrics. We looked at what was around the location in Islington. Across the road is the Almeida Theatre, we looked at how many local community groups there were involved in activities that chimed with our desire to explore for growth.

Measurement is based on many things – all of them add up to the simple question of 'are we building relationships effectively'?

The space

In it’s simplest terms, it’s a ‘Living Room’ at the front and a ‘Garden’ at the rear.

The front space is a very inviting, almost cosy, apartment you’d like to live in. We kept asking ‘is it inviting? Is it warm? Would you want to spend time there?’

A place where small, intimate events can take place. A space that is focused on encouraging conversation and human interaction.  The large alcove with the ‘fly posters’ as wall paper, the wall of magazines to grab, the charging points. Simply, a good place to be.

Step over the threshold into the Garden and it changes – near natural light, clever planting give that very urban feel of being in a City when you find that unexpected little bit of hidden green. A focal point of a wonderful cast concrete font that plays the role of hand wash point and nod to the garden it lives in. Subtle plaster relief of plants on the walls give a sense of 'endless' and gives a backdrop to product display.

Are there products in the space?

Of course there is and it was always designed to be product led – after all, that’s what C&E do.  But the space is there to let the stories around them be told. The display furniture in the Garden encourages use and trying, those inevitable ‘Shelfie’ moments with the antique mirrors. Product testers decanted into beautiful ceramic containers on wooden stands.

The ‘Pot Board', the 'Specimen Table', the 'Writing Desk' in the living room, the different furniture all designed to display and tell stories in a multitude of ways.

What about digital?

Yes, there is digital, but the aim was for it to be quiet to begin with and grow even quieter as it melts into being an enabler. My ‘being digital, not doing digital’ is at play. Don’t expect to see big screens or iPads out screwed to tables. In one sense, my aim is for anything digital to disappear and that means the customer is then just interacting and participating with what’s around them. You could say the dream is invisible omni-channel.

Participation is at the heart.

We realised that building relationships is about participation that is of equal value to those taking part. The goal is to encourage, increase and continue participation with the Islington community. The store will open early and be open late for events – with normal store hours in the middle.

To that end, the team we have brought in are from varied backgrounds. Events, theatre, hospitality. They have already reached out to and engaged over 100 local groups. Their job is to continually drive participation.

There is space for local artists and creatives to show a bit of work, both large and small. There will be a rotating 'artist in residence'. Next weekend Vic Lee the fabulous mural artist is doing a live piece of work. You can join them here and find out about Vic here.

Finally

To do retail in the High Street you have to be open to all manner of influences, be ready to test and learn, to bring in outside of retail thinking to help shake up the usual approaches. The Townhouse is a first major conceptual change for C&E in over 20 years. On that basis alone, I am proud to have been part of it and always will be.

There isn't online and offline, there isn't omni-channel - there is just, in many ways, simply how people feel about what you are offering and doing. The Townhouse is an experiment in getting to a relationship beyond the just transactional.

The Townhouse and Global Digital Platform form two key lodestones of the Experience Strategy. To have launched both in 2018 is a huge achievement that is a real emphatic full stop.

More on the Experience Strategy next...