West is best: Westfield mall is a retail dream

London's brand new Westfield shopping mall opened last week in Shepherds Bush /White City and is the largest urban mall in Europe with over 150,000 sq m of retail space at a cost of £1.7m. This is a retail planner's dream with the ability to start from scratch in terms of ideal brand adjacencies coupled with a premium courtship of retailers from around the world with a key location and must-visit mall of the future. A win-win situation for consumers and retailers alike that ensures shoppers stay all day - just like I did.

The first of three major mall developments from international mall operator Westfield (the next is in Stratford in time for the Olympics), the west London location is all set to become a destination shopping hotspot to rival other south of England malls such as Bluewater or Lakeside - which look dated in comparison now. And the best thing about the new Westfield London is that its full to the brim with new retail concepts - after Westfield developers gave retailers the challenge to push boundaries when it came to store design innovation.




A host of retailers launched new store concepts at the mall that is anchored by Marks & Spencer, Next, House of Fraser and Debenhams with Waitrose as key supermarket anchor for food.

Fashion brands lead the way for launching new store concepts. House of Fraser was the major anchor retail tenant to pass on the challenge to its vendors to focus on innovation - with Whistles a clear leader in the new formats launch game. New CEO of Whistles, Jane Shepherdson was there on opening day to check out the brand new calmer, cleaner, pale store design that allows customers to browse the collections with focus.

Elsewhere M&S looked to have placed new importance on its visual merchandising with a runway running through the middle of the ground floor full of mannequins. A focus on each of its sub-brands with clear concession areas can only work in the retailers favour - from Autograph to Limited Collection and the best-selling Per Una. The new Patricia Field for M&S celebrity collection is merchandised centre stage and is full of the New York City super stylist's character.

A walk through Next's giant corner site leaves no lifestyle dressing option unturned with all the retailer's merchandise categories catered for - known for kidswear and homewear the retailer and mail-order giant dedicated its ground floor areas to these best selling products.





Meanwhile many retailers debuted brand new retail formats including New Look, Ted Baker, Oasis and Topshop from the high-street sector. Topshop's new store layout - featuring giant neon framed boxes for mannequins and a clubby atmosphere - will be the same as the New York flagship now slated to open in February. Ted Baker's latest store was based on greyhound racing according to founder Ray Kelvin who said the store would do well as part of the west London location. Barratts and Aldo also put new footwear concepts to the test while Terra-Plana and Timberland both unveiled new sustainable retail designs using reclaimed wood. Some retailers even had fun with their new shop fits - I loved Camper's "X marks the spot meet me here" store. Plus it was first time around for a handful of overseas retailers including Ugg, Pull & Bear, Hollister and Matchka.

Meanwhile the hoards of half-term shoppers praised the new site as catering to their every whim - from high-street to department store to luxury designer brands in the dedicated "Designer Village" area that saw many vendors missing the opening deadline day. Reports suggested the luxury brands involved blamed "complicated and luxury shop fits" for the delay. Only a handful opened on time including Christian Dior, Tiffany, Hugo Boss, Tommy Hilfiger, Hackett, Myla, Twenty Eight Twelve and Donna Ida boutiques. Prada, Miu Miu, Mulberry and Gucci are all scheduled to open by December with Louis Vuitton finally opening by March.

There were over 160,000 visitors on opening day according to Westfield executives who said consumers were defying the credit crunch by voting with their feet and supporting London's new shopping centre.

Here's looking forward to the East End version coming soon to Stratford.

For a mall tour in pictures see below selection plus my Picasa album:

Westfield London mall tour inside

Absolut's House of Masquerade

Trust Absolut Vodka to do the ultimate pop-up store!

The House of Masquerade launched with a decadent dressing up party in London's hip Shoreditch last night - and what better way to get in the party spirit than trying on a few vintage looks with Absolut cocktail in hand?!

For five nights only Absolut has teamed up with London vintage boutique Mint and British illustrator Daisy de Villeneuve to create a pop-up store and bar experience where guests can peruse the vintage rails, get one-to-one styling advice and listen to DJ sets from hip London music and performance duo The Broken Hearts.

It's the quintessential pop-up store brand experience space - mixing shopping with socialising for extra brownie points among London's jaded fashion and bar set.






With a new red sequin zippered Absolut Masquerade gift pack as launch pad, the pop-up store space aims to update the concept of Masquerade for the modern era, where the possibilities of being yourself and expressing your personality are more important than ever before. Absolut aims to bring this to life through the House of Masquerade, where guests on launch night were given free reign to try on almost limitless outfit combinations and be photographed in the ready made Absolut photo booth.

With masquerade and burlesque as the dominant themes for the evening, party goers rocked a whole host of vintage looks - and the fun continues until Monday.

House of Masquerade from Absolut Vodka, 68-72 Redchurch Street, London E2. October 24-27.

Take-away retail

I was historicizing the pop-up retail concept with a colleague the other day and he claims they began around 15 years ago with 'gypsy' stores that popped up along Oxford Street when retail outlets became empty in the last recession. The gypsies moved in, popped up Sale signs in the window and a new instant retail hit was born.

Comme des Garcons became a main protagonist of the pop-up concept as we know it today with its far flung guerilla stores only open for a year and then disappearing without trace. I remember a minion once covered the Glasgow CDG space for me, I think it was one of around 12 locations all over the world. They were always opened in desolate hard to find places and then closed again without much fanfare - very CDG, very anti what pop-up as marketing tool has become.

Now many retail ideas later we have moved on to the Pocket store concept from a more mature and dare I say commercial CDG operation. It focuses on all the brand's best sellers - from the Play collections to the perfumes to the mini-leather goods in a small, compact and not unbijoux-like retail box space. It's full of things you want to put in your pocket in fact. And now there are two of them in CDG's second home of Paris. And if you can't get there get a feel for the Pocket store concept in the Dover Street Market ground floor.

I can't help but think of a recent and significantly connected retail trend: the bodega store. Hidden away in a bonafida bodega in Boston is a hip sneaker and limited edition sports gear store Bodega, masquerading behind a colourful retail exterior selling toilet tissue and crisps.


Meanwhile super-size US value chain Target saw this clever marketing idea and jumped on it big-style, doing its usual media-frenzy, attention grabbing, pop-up store concept during New York fashion week in September. Not one but four Target Bodegas popped up in Manhattan offering shelves full of pick-me-up and consume-me food, drinks, snacks, accessories and clothing from its wealth of discount price merch. New Yorkers swarmed like flies. And so another innovative retail concept was burned in hell.

Fashion aggregators

I like today's Business of Fashion post: Can fashion bloggers be trusted online authorities? Of course! And yes us fashion bloggers are here to stay - speed is everything in today's fast fashion world and a quick scouring of the blogs is the fastest way to garner opinion.

That many of the major daily newspapers have chosen to add blog entries to their style pages only serves to back up the importance of speedy, considered opinion. Who can live without their seasonal dose of Cathy Horyn's hugely respected On the Runway blog, or Style.com's guest bloggers - for your daily dose? Speaking of which IMG's access all area's Fashion Week Daily diatribe from the front row is the industry must read. Way ahead of the pack was Scott Schuman with his roving lens and the design studio standard blog The Sartorialist.

And so the newer, faster, live-er offerings from the likes of Racked (you really killed it) or New York Magazine's The Cut and apparently now everyone else in between from Twitter or Flickr to MyitThings and Style Observer via the American Express backed portal Inside The Tents.

However this is nothing new. It's what the wire services such as AFP, Associated Press and Reuters have been providing for years. Back at my old job as a bona-fide fashion hack we used to scan the wires in the morning but it was exclusives that made the cut. I guess that's mostly the problem: all this aggregating of fashion opinion that's out there isn't even fact. There's a lot of dross out there and people are happy to put their name to it on-line. Quantity not quality has become the mantra in pursuit of the daily post. Maybe bloggers should consider themselves as online commentators (even journalists) and think of something original (whoa exclusive?!) to say if they bother to post?

And finally a word about the newest fashion aggregator: Distill. Edited by fashion historian, journalist and general know-it-all Colin McDowell, Distill presents a digested read of the style and fashion press from all over the world, offering a shorthand guide to what and who are in fashion, and how those trends are being captured and covered. A fashion magazine to rival and trump all the others no less. As McDowell says: "It's such a brilliant idea, I was a little peeved I hadn't thought of it myself." Still I must say, it's better than the zillions of posts pertaining to be fashion commentary out there that don't really say much at all. Is this a modern day, on-line version of Emporer's new clothes syndrome?