Speaking exclusively to Retail Week, Frasers chief customer officer David Clark lays out his expansion plans for the brand’s retail media business Elevate.
Opened last Friday, Clark says that the new Sports Direct store in Liverpool is the first in the group’s history to have been “designed and constructed with Elevate (the brand’s retail media platform)” in mind.
The 65,000 sq ft store is “powered by Elevate’s extensive media inventory, including in-store, onsite and out of home channels, to deliver real-time content, targeted promotions and measurable brand engagement”.
It represents the first step for Frasers in a major rollout of its retail media strategy, which launched in May 2025, with the target of adding over 1,000 new retail media screens across its existing and new portfolio over the next three years.
“Our big picture target is to be one of the largest retail media screen networks in the UK within the next few years. We’re starting with the UK, but we’re also building capability to roll out this platform into Europe and into our global partner network over the next few years,” said Clark.
With that goal in mind, Clark says the new Sports Direct in Liverpool will be the “blueprint” for Frasers flagship stores moving forward.
“I think that Liverpool is now the best expression of our brands UK, and we’ll be using the lessons that we’ve learned, in the blueprint that we’ve created in Liverpool to inform our flagship elevate strategy moving forward.
“There will be new stores, but the broader rollout will be a retrofit across our current estate, starting with our largest flagship experiences and then rolling down across the rest of the chain, across all Sports Direct and Flannels.”
Clark also said that Frasers sees international opportunities for its Elevate retail media platform and for new stores designed with the offer front and centre.
While he wouldn’t be drawn on which European country Frasers would launch Elevate in first, he said the “plan was to get going with our digital capability within the next 12 months”.
“We’re only just getting started with Elevate,” he added. “I see it as a significant commercial opportunity for the group to deliver significant bottom line growth.
“But it’s also a significant commercial opportunity for our partners to grow their share within our ecosystem of 32 million customers, utilising their trade budgets, but really getting better at targeting the consumers that have been through our ecosystem from a brand perspective as well”.
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