Dixons has unveiled its latest small store design at its shop in Gatwick’s South Terminal.

Airports are busy places and few demonstrate this characteristic more effectively than Gatwick’s South Terminal in the first couple of weeks after the school summer holidays begin. The rush, rush, rush feeling has been accentuated this year by the major facelift that is being given to the terminal, which has meant a lot of hoardings and the sense of the building being even more crowded than usual.

The end is in sight for this period of transition however and, as well as an enhanced interior, the South Terminal has also had an overhaul of its retail provision. And one of the more striking elements is the Dixons Travel store, which was revamped last month.

There has been a Dixons Travel shop in this location for as long as most budget and charter airline passengers might care to remember and there’s also a smaller accessories store in the same building.

The point about the travel shop is that almost every passenger heading to the departure gates will pass by this 1,200 sq ft store, meaning that anywhere between 35,000 and 90,000 people a day will be potential Dixons Travel shoppers.

On this reckoning it should be a goldmine and Neil Hollins, managing director of Dixons Travel, confirms that at Heathrow’s Terminal 5 the Dixons Travel store takes between six and seven times the sales per sq ft that would be expected of an equivalent high street outlet.

This is probably just as well because airport retailing is an expensive business when it comes to rents. But the rewards are there to be reaped and Dixons has struck an unusual deal - the amount of rent paid being dependent on the level of turnover achieved, with no minimum. Practically, this means it is in the interest of both Gatwick and Dixons to make it work because success will be dependent on diverting passing travellers and turning them into paying shoppers.

And for those headed to the fleshpots of the Med and elsewhere there is a chance that this store might actually work as an in-airport break before the holiday proper gets started. Katie Bickerstaffe, Dixons UK and Ireland chief executive, says: “In this airport, you’re spat out from the duty free area and then you’re on the way to the gates.

Airports can be stressful places, so this [the shop] can act as a relief for people.”

Browsable play tables

In order for shoppers to experience a possible Dixons de-stressing programme they first have to be given a reason to enter the store. It is in fact quite hard to ignore this fascia, which has a curving, shiny black canopy that defines the external perimeter of this open-sided retail space.

The Dixons Travel logo is in bold white against this and to the accusation that this gives the store a somewhat overtly masculine persona, Bickerstaffe points to the half-globe that forms part of the brand’s signature on the canopy: “It’s got colours too - that’s what you get for having a girl as a chief executive,” she quips.

The green and blue of the globe are picked out and used in the store as the accent colours for the shopfit, according to Hollins. This proves to be the case when the eye descends from the logo and an initial assessment is made of what lies within. The store’s back wall is composed of a series of wood-framed modules, each of which has a different category of electronic accessory. Within the frames, the blue colour of the logo helps to provide definition and also makes the space more appealing.

Long before the consumer reaches this point, however, they will encounter the mid-shop ‘play tables’. The term ‘play tables’ was first used when Dixons opened its Black store in Birmingham more than 18 months ago. Back then, these were long, white-topped affairs bristling with new technology products and looking like the kind of thing you might find in a trendy architect’s office. In Gatwick, owing to the constraints of space and to the fact that women find smaller displays more “browsable”, according to Bickerstaffe, the play tables have been scaled down.

Now they are black, with wood veneer tops and can be used singly or clustered, thanks to being mounted on wheels, to form larger mid-shop units. It is worth noting the developments that have been made to the display surfaces of these play tables. Perspex silhouettes of holiday destinations have been mounted on them to add “a bit of fun”, as Hollins puts it, and the prices and product descriptions are inserted into a recess on the edge of the units, which is then covered with a Perspex strip to keep things tidy.

There are also curved, white tablets on the top of the play-tables that allow content about the products to be displayed, adding visual merchandising interest to categories that run the risk of being a little mundane, no matter how well designed. And occupying pole position is a small play table that has been partly built from cream-coloured Corian. This is a material that has the qualities of marble and which costs very much more than a vinyl finish, but it shows and this piece of equipment is used to display some of the more high-end headphones and tablets.

Flight-ready service

The star of the show however is the cash desk, which takes all of the shopfitting finishes around the store and combines them in a stratified whole. Practically, this means a layer of wood, followed by a layer of cream Corian, followed by the blue of the perimeter. Bickerstaffe claims that the material pallet was based, in part, on her bathroom, but the outcome is sleek, hi-tech and unbathroom-like.

Finally, a Knowhow desk has been incorporated as an extension of the cash desk, meaning that having bought a product, shoppers can have it made ready for use on the flight they are about to take.

It’s a simple touch, but not something that is generally found in airport technology stores.

Hollins says that the fitout of this shop costs about 25% more than a Dixons on the high street, but when the sales per sq ft are taken into consideration this seems a wise investment as far as attracting shoppers is concerned. Large parts of what is on view in Gatwick are being installed in the store at Bluewater and it seems reasonable to surmise that, providing Dixons continues on its upward trajectory, the approach will be extended more generally across the chain.

For busy holidaymakers and business travellers passing through Gatwick’s South Terminal meanwhile, this is about as good as it gets in terms of appealing displays of technology. This one looks set to garner a fair share of the disposable cash that is passing though the airport on the way to having a good time.   

Dixons travel, South Terminal, Gatwick

Design In-house

Number of Dixons outlets in the terminalTwo

Size 1,200 sq ft

Dixons’ airport sales per sq ft Typically six to seven times higher than in a high street Dixons

Construction cost 25% higher than a high street Dixons

Revamp completed July

Interiors Survey

Retail Week is conducting a short survey to learn more about the current trends in store design and the challenges facing the sector, as well as find out what retailers have the best store designs.

The survey should take no longer than 2 minutes to complete and all participants will be in with a chance of winning a £50 Amazon voucher in our prize draw.

To complete the survey go to: tinyurl.com/interiorssurvey