It's high time retailers looked beyond their competitors for store design inspiration and spread the net further afield. There are new tricks to be learnt and ideas to take on board, if only retailers will look around.

Talking to a crowd of equine tack and sadlery retailers at the NEC last week, it was hard not to wonder why they might be so interested in understanding why New Look, River Island and others like them are successful. These, after all, are retailers camped out within a highly specialist market, where the great majority are owner operators who have just the one, small shop.

Yet to a man and woman (and in fact they were mostly women), they seemed to have a real enthusiasm for examining large chains and the way in which they lay out and sell their stock. And for the most part, they wanted to know how to do things better.

This is a singular question and is probably the most important reason that delegates attend any conference. In this instance, it meant looking at pictures of stores, considering their design and wondering how this might be applied within an entirely different arena. As such, these were retailers with genuine curiosity, who realised that their horizons do not necessarily have to be prescribed by the sector of which they form a part.

Somebody asked the other day whether there was much point in retail design at the moment. Fair comment. At the moment there are a lot of other concerns that are probably perceived as being further up the agenda than whether a shop looks good, not the least of which might be shifting the stock you’ve got.

The point, however, is that it is precisely in times such as these that retailers should be subjecting their stores to the greatest possible scrutiny. If Woolies had watched Wilkinsons rather more closely, for instance, it might not have found itself in the position it did in December. But perhaps even more importantly than observing the activities of your immediate rivals, it pays dividends to head out and look at shops en masse.

Hidden within every seemingly unrelated sector there will be something worth looking at. At BETA International (the British Equine Trade Association, in case you’re wondering), for this was the event on which the NEC faithful had descended, particular attention was being paid to the way in which mobile phone retailers merchandise their stock. In common with tack shops, these are retailers that sell a preponderance of small things from large spaces. Parallels were clearly being drawn and conclusions reached. Larger retailers could do worse than to follow this modus operandi and look outside their immediate commercial hinterlands. It’s another tool at a time when all possible leads are helpful.