Mention the name Herzogenaurach and aside from the difficulty of pronunciation, most people will draw a blank when asked what the small Bavarian town is best known for. However, for anyone involved in the branded goods business one thing will immediately spring to mind: Adidas.

Herzogenaurach is the headquarters of the global brand and it is here that new products, marketing initiatives and store interiors are conceived and made a reality.

The latest evidence that the centre continues to exert its force upon the retail side of the business is to be found on Paris’ Champs Elysées. Two months ago, the sports brand reopened its 21,230 sq ft store following a major refurbishment and extension that has turned it into a store that Adidas would class as one of its Signature stores.

Kevin Gill, managing director at Manchester-based design consultancy Judge Gill, which worked on the project, says that Signature stores sit at the top of the Adidas retail tree. There is only one other Signature store, in Beijing, opened in time for last year’s Olympics.

Although the two-floor Paris flagship is almost 11,000 sq ft smaller than its Far Eastern sister, it represents the latest thinking for Adidas and the chances are good that what has been done here will make an appearance in other stores, albeit in a more modest form.

Signature move

A word of explanation about the Adidas store hierarchy is called for at this point. As well as Signature stores, Adidas also operates Statement branches, found in “major financial centres”, according to Gill, and Core stores, which cover just about everything else.

The retailer takes the store hierarchy seriously and there is still some discussion about whether the New York store, which opened last year, qualifies as
a Signature store by dint of the amount of money spent on it and its size, although it is generally reckoned to be a Statement outlet.

Adidas appears to be a top-down outfit for no better reason than that the flagship stores provide the tone and many of the graphic elements for those further down the food chain.

On this basis, the Paris store represents a big development for Adidas. Gill and his team have worked with the brand for more than five years and until recently, the modus operandi for the generic store design format was fetchingly named “SPC2”. This won’t mean much to the uninformed, but it was the starting point for the Paris shop. “What we’ve done is taken the existing concept and layered on top of it,” says Gill.

Yet sitting on a bench outside the store as time-pressed Parisians hurtle down this world-famous, six-lane highway that is a byword for upscale shopping, there is little to set this store apart from what you might see elsewhere.
In part, this is to do with the listed nature of almost every structure along the Champs Elysées.

This means that the Adidas store has a mid-19th century appearance and is formed from golden sand-coloured blocks of stone. The fact that a substantial portion of it is fake, built just two years ago, is by the by – illusion is all. In fact, from any distance, almost the only sense that you are looking at a sports store is provided by the generic black and white, bus-stop style Adidas sign that stands proud of the building.

Step inside and things change substantially. For anybody who has visited the Oxford Street Statement store, the three parallel lines of lights, set against a black ceiling and that stretch away into the interior, will be familiar. But there, more or less, the resemblance ends.

Gill says what makes this store a move in a fresh direction is a “new footwear concept”, the separation of the genders (in terms of presentation), and the inclusion of miCoach – an in-store training system designed to assess how fit a shopper might be. This may sound fairly glib, but,glance to the right, just inside the main door and the sense that something bold is being tried out becomes readily apparent.

A back-illuminated wall of fancy-looking football boots is proof of Adidas’s intention to concentrate on what it calls “core skills” (football, running, training and basketball to you and me). Gill says that this is part of doing something that mobile phone retailers have been trying to achieve for more than five years now – moving from being a shifter of products to a seller of services.

Practically, this means that the boots that are on sale at the front of the shop are rather more than meets the eye. A €190 (£170) pair of boots can be customised and different types of football boot are available, according to the type of position played.

The display also stands as a ground floor statement of intent. This floor is about performance, while upstairs (about 40 per cent of the total space) is concerned with the fashion side of Adidas’s clothing and accessories ranges.

Gill points out that the two floors are almost like different shops. There is a reason for this. Adidas treats fashion and performance as discrete divisions, with their own buying, marketing and management teams and, as Gill says, they might as well be separate companies.

Back to the ground floor and as well as the many groups of mannequins, striking highly athletic poses, and the sloping metal structure that runs along the perimeter, designed to look like bars at a gym, it is the product division by sex and age (men’s, women’s and children’s) that particularly stands out. There is also the miCoach area. This is a slick, minimalist space that dominates the right-hand side of the shop.

Anyone who has walked along Brighton pier and played the arcade game where you try to hit moles with a mallet as they poke their heads out of holes will realise that the miCoach
reaction tester is just an update of this old faithful. There are also tests to see how high you can spring in the air and how quickly you can run on the spot.

Unlike Brighton pier, however, the results are analysed by a computer and should shoppers so wish, these can be sent to their home PCs. The idea is that Adidas tempts its shoppers to become part of a club, giving them more reasons to come back to the store. The miCoach feature was first launched in the Berlin Statement store just before Christmas. 

The back wall  also demands comment. This is a wall of footwear and where, previously, each shoe type would have been displayed within its category – football boots with football kit and so on – in Paris, a destination shoe department has been created. Gill says that this was trialled in London last year and resulted in a 147 per cent sales uplift.

Access to the first floor is via a central escalator, which has a series of glass boxes just below handrail height, each of which contains a different model of Adidas boot. Arriving upstairs, the mood changes immediately. Whereas the predominant colour of the performance-led ground floor is a serious black, on this level, all is white.

Adidas has employed Canadian design company Sid Lee to create the upstairs interior – reflecting the split within the company. And from the outset it is clear that this floor is about fashion, with everything from a multi-thread overlocking machine, allowing shoppers to personalise their clothing, to distinctly expensive accessories. Overall, the ambience is very much brighter and with names such as Porsche, Stella McCartney and Diesel, the sense that you have strayed into a brand-led fashion store is everywhere.

A fairly obvious question about this store is whether it can be replicated elsewhere. Gill says that a lot of work went into ensuring that the design is modular and capable of being flexed for bigger or smaller spaces. 

And it is apparent that large parts of the Paris shop could easily be installed into other stores. A supplementary question has to be whether this would make economic sense given the present economic backdrop.

Adidas: marathon runner

As a brand, Adidas traces its origins back to 1948 when the company was founded in the small Bavarian town of Herzogenaurach. Since then it has become a global giant with only Nike and Puma as its rivals.

Presently the bulk of its expansion activities are focused on the Far East where Kevin Gill, managing director of design consultancy Judge Gill, says that six stores a day are being opened – “mainly in China” – although the whole region remains a honeypot for the brand.

This chimes with Adidas’s annual report for last year, which notes that in “currency-neutral” terms the brand enjoyed “double-digit” growth in both Asia and Latin America, revenues were “stable” in Europe, while they fell in the US. Group sales during the year rose 6 per cent. 

In the UK, its major standalone stores are in London, Manchester and Birmingham, all of which were launched in the early part of this decade, but which are now some distance in design terms from the interiors of the newer Beijing and Paris Signature stores.