Habitat is under Home Retail’s ownership and, three years since it entered administration, uses its outlets to entice customers online.

Retail Week stores editor John Ryan speaks to Habitat managing director Clare Askem

It is three years since Habitat was rescued out of administration by Home Retail Group. It emerged in a highly diminished form with just three stores to its name, all of them in London.

Clare Askem, the managing director, was brought in by Home Retail Group to effect a turnaround for the brand, and within a relatively short time some Homebase stores began to incorporate Habitat outposts as part of their proposition.

There are now 37 Habitat-in-Homebases, three of which opened in the past month. Askem says that in the long term the aim is to have “north of 80 stores” of this kind, which will provide capsule collection access for shoppers and an incentive to visit the broader world of Habitat online.

Askem pulls few punches about what went wrong pre-administration, and admits that both product and pricing had lost their way. The stores themselves had proved costly to build and owing to their generally central locations, expensive to operate.

Habitat, Chichester

Location: Homebase Chichester

Design: In-house

Size: 5,500 sq ft

Opened: March 2015

At home in Homebase

The logic of putting a taste of Habitat in Homebase stores is obvious. The host stores have the space and tend to attract a ‘softer-end’ DIY and home furnishings crowd, meaning that a Habitat “point of view”, as Askem, refers to it, is more likely to strike a chord with those walking through the doors of a Homebase.

There has also been an almost complete rethink as far as product and pricing architecture are concerned.

Askem says that one of her first actions when she took the reins was to hire a new creative director and today around 85% of the products that Habitat offers are wholly designed by the retailer.

Practically this means that in 2015, Habitat is once more in control of its own destiny. A third of its sales now come from the remaining London standalone stores, a third from online and the remaining fraction is derived from the Habitat shops in Homebase branches.

And things are changing in the latter third. The latest iteration of the “journey” that Askem says Habitat is making can be seen on the south coast, in Chichester. Here a 30,000 sq ft Homebase has had a 5,500 sq ft Habitat in place for three weeks, making it almost twice the size of any of the retailer’s other shop-in-shops.

It is located on the right-hand side of the store and makes its appearance felt almost immediately by being very different from the rest of the interior. The design was created in-house and the initial impression is that two things mark this out as being different from the rest of the store: the floor and the mid-shop wall.

The floor comes in two parts – a high-contrast black and white chequerboard area and, beyond that, a washed oak planked floor. Askem is pleased with the black and white flooring in particular: “The Habitat range is generally brightly coloured so having black and white on the floor is a good way of ensuring that the product stands out.”

The oak floor runs behind the mid-shop wall and forms a natural break between smaller household items, the domain of the black and white floor, and more substantial pieces of furniture.

“There has been an almost complete rethink as far as product and pricing architecture are concerned”

John Ryan, Stores editor

It is the mid-shop wall that really steals the show however. This is a tall feature and as well as having a large black 3D logo on its top, it is also home to a brand statement about what Habitat stands for and a very large screen. The screen is for promotional purposes, endlessly showing off items from the Habitat range, but it does so in an almost pop-art manner with vivid backdrops and swirling patterns. It is in fact composed of 16 smaller screens, meaning that a single composite image or 16 individual images can be displayed.

Askem admits that this kind of thing does not come cheap, but that in terms of drawing attention to Habitat within a host environment it is highly effective. It also succeeds in keeping the gaze more or less at product level. One of the problems facing any lifestyle retailer seeking to make a go of a space in an edge-of-town shed is ensuring that shoppers look at what has been installed – rather than staring at what can be wide, open, prairie-like spaces. On this level the white mid-shop wall is intended to focus the eye as well as being a design feature.

In front of the wall there is a royal blue cash desk. It has screens incorporated in its top, but the overwhelming impression is of a bright, minimalist extended cube, perfectly in keeping with the “brand aesthetic”, according to Askem.

Retail theatre

Other elements that deserve  mention include a “chair wall” at the front of the space which is similar to one in The Conran Shop, and a display of light bulbs that saves energy by only being lit when a button is pushed. This adds a degree of theatre to the lighting department and provides additional reasons for pausing somewhere that might be functional in other hands.

Another two Habitat shop-in-Homebase stores are to open before the end of March, in Newcastle-under-Lyme and Harrogate.

Askem is adamant that Habitat is now a very different organisation from what it was pre-administration and says: “We firmly believe we’re on a multichannel journey. We have always thought it was a fantastic brand where the original proposition was fundamentally good.

“We have learnt as we have gone through different versions of the format and we now have several different executions.”

In the right direction

But does all of this equate to a retail name that is resurgent and which will stay the course? There can be little doubting Askem’s optimism or her enthusiasm for where Habitat is headed. What is evolving is a retail beast that operates in a different manner from its predecessor and which seems to function well in what some might view as an environment antipathetic to a design-led brand.

With reinvented interiors, remodelled products and a multi-channel approach to its customers, Habitat is not what it was. Or rather perhaps it is closer to what the brand stood for in its heyday.

The Chichester Homebase implant looks good, should do well for Habitat and does go a long way towards overcoming the dilemma faced by so many large space retailers: what to do with excess square footage.