Change is a given in store design, but the landscape has shifted more than normal this year and the pace continues to quicken.

“It’s been a long year” was the response of one store designer when asked how 2014 had been. This is particularly true for retailers and those charged with creating the stores from which they trade as they have come to terms with a landscape that is shifting rapidly and where consumer loyalty can no longer be taken for granted.

And if there is any word in 2014 that seems to have united both retailers and store designers it is ‘experience’. Retailers with shops, rather than pure-play merchants, are asking their designers to create interiors that will provide shoppers with an experience.

The kind of experience they’re asking for is something that the online merchants are still largely incapable of replicating and is one of the few things that has the capacity to keep shoppers heading for high streets and malls.

Interestingly, the term tended to be used when talking about fashion retailers, but it now has as much application when walking the aisles of a big supermarket as it does when navigating a path around Topshop.

But are retailers coming up with the goods? Tim Greenhalgh, chief creative officer and chairman at Fitch, says: “We’re actually thinking about how a lot of retail has lost its vision and asking how retailers can have an experience signature.

Jeff Bezos said a brand is ‘what other people say about you when you’re not in the room’. I think a lot of brands are doing this quite well, but a lot of retailers are struggling. Nike certainly does it well, as does IKEA, but there are many who don’t.” He adds: “You can’t omnichannel yourself out of a poor proposition.”

A quick stroll down Regent Street illustrates the point that experience is the order of the day. Wellington boot brand Hunter has opened a three-floor shop that takes the idea of the great outdoors (the brand’s spiritual home) and brings it indoors.

It adds a twist, courtesy of high-resolution screens with video content and features an in-store outdoor hut. This is certainly an experience and it’s about adding value to what is essentially a basic proposition.

David Dalziel, creative director at the eponymous design consultancy Dalziel + Pow, notes that digital has certainly had a large part to play this year, but that it has sat alongside shopper experience: “Store design 2014 has been a year of extremes of digital integration and analogue customer immersion.”

The analogue customer immersion can be experienced at the Notcutts garden centre in Wheatcroft, Nottingham, where Dalziel + Pow created a market-inspired dining concept that is easy to understand and requires no digital enhancement.

Yet digital cannot be ignored. Dalziel continues: “We have seen the extremes of digital integration in the creation of our new formats for Argos and Rockar Hyundai in Bluewater. These concepts and others like them simply couldn’t exist without the co-ordinated integration of technology, they couldn’t have been landed five years ago, such has been the advance of technology, both in store and on consumers’ own devices.”

Or put another way, during 2014 we have seen digital, which has until recently been somewhat regarded as a thing apart by retailers, becoming just another part of the in-store armoury. Digital, in its customer-facing form, is set to become another tool that retailers have at their disposal to create an identity, according to Dalziel.

There have, however, been other elements that have spurred both brands at retail and retailers to give rather more thought to their interiors than might have been the case in the past. The rise of the discounter this year has tested retailers’ mettle.

Bill Cumming, owner and creative director at Twelve Studio, says: “With discounters it’s been a matter of confidence and meeting customers’ needs. With all of these things, the people who are succeeding are the ones who have proved to be more agile.”

“We’ve seen a very definite shift towards braver and more innovative thinking”

Jeff Kindleysides, Checkland Kindleysides

Cumming, whose consultancy has worked extensively for supermarkets, says there is also a sense that we are still at the outset: “It feels like people are at the start line limbering up and 2015 will be when the race gets underway. I think we are on the verge of another sea-change, the kind of thing that only happens every 30 or 40 years. The other point is that retailers are going to have to move quicker to accommodate change. It’s no longer about doing the simple things well. It’s about reset.”

Digital, experience, discounting and convenience might therefore be seen as the store design watchwords for 2014. But where does this leave the large chains that still have big footprint stores and which are somewhat more cumbersome when it comes to embracing change?

Dalziel reads the runes for the supermarkets: “Next year we will see further challenges for the food retailers as the shopper switches from the weekly bulk shop to convenience mode. Big boxes will be carved up and complimentary traders will be introduced to occupy vacant space. Concessioning space, flexible formats, reactive merchandising, retail in 2015 needs to be planned smarter and more future-proof.”

It’s an argument not lost on Jeff Kindleysides, creative director at Checkland Kindleysides, who comments: “2014 has been an extremely busy year as far as store design is concerned, we’ve seen a very definite shift towards braver and more innovative thinking particularly in our brand clients [Checkland Kindleysides worked on the Regent Street Hunter store].”

He continues: “The outlook for 2015 looks like it will carry the same kind of momentum in store design activity, with a spread across new design formats and roll-out. It will also be a very interesting year for supermarkets as we see the landscape unfold even more to reveal the future direction of the category.”

Rumour has it that changing shopper habits and an autumn of quite unparalleled mildness has wrought havoc across a broad swathe of UK retail in the latter part of 2014. And to judge by the level of in-season discounting that has taken place this year, this would appear to be the case.

If this is to be combatted and in-store experience is to be a reality, then design consultancies and in-house store design departments look as if they may have another long year in front of them. If Cumming is right and the race is just beginning, we should anticipate the pace of change hotting up even more over the next 12 months.

And beware of false prophets bearing digital. As Steve Collis, managing director at JHP Design, puts it: “The digital world is important but is often no more than a better representation of the video walls of the past as customers stubbornly refuse to get involved with interactive media when they have real product in front of them preferring to ‘interact’ with their phones or at home with their tablets.” Plus ça change…

Digitial edition: Retail Week Interiors - December 2014

You can read the Retail Week Interiors supplement as a fully digital edition here.