Renting out retail space cannot be the future for department stores that want to remain relevant. John Ryan heads to Montreal to explore further.

A weekend spent in Montreal provided the perfect opportunity to look at the Canadian take on department stores, and few come much grander in this big Francophone city (the largest after Paris, apparently) than Holt Renfrew, an Art Deco multi-floor edifice.

It has a very distinctive exterior and is just next door to the posh Ritz-Carlton hotel, presumably meaning, that shoppers pour out of one and head into the other.

House rules

When then do so however, they could be absolutely anywhere. Walking the floors of this store is an exercise in looking at brands. Room after room after room of them and all of them fitted out in their own way.

There is in fact nothing to mark this one out as different from any other emporium of the kind and a mild sense of ‘been there, done that’ is pretty hard to avoid.

”Walking the floors of this store is an exercise in looking at brands. Room after room after room of them and all of them fitted out in their own way”

What the shopper is confronted by is a good, old-fashioned ‘house of brands’ – a shell in which luxury labels have been more or less allowed to run riot.

All of this means perhaps that there are other options that might be better to consider (The Bay and La Maison Ogilvy are both in town, although the latter also trails in the store personality stakes).

Selfridges in London

Selfridges, London

Selfridges in London has a sense of self, unlike many other generic department stores

The house of brands sometimes looks less about creating a distinctive department store and rather more about renting space to whoever will pay the price. Now take the trip back to the UK and consider what is done by our department stores.

The most high-profile – think perhaps Selfridges and Liberty, among others – have a sense of place, inside and out.

Back in the UK

Signs around Selfridges on Oxford Street inform the onlooker that there is an extensive remodeling taking place inside the store at the moment.

There is nothing terribly unusual about this, Selfridges always seems like a store on the move with something new greeting the visitor every time a visit is made.

This is its strength and it also means that the internal landscape very much belongs to Selfridges, and shoppers know where they are when they are visiting.

The rise of the mono-brand emporium probably means that in the medium-to-longer term the writing is on the wall for the house of brands and that survival will mean being a ‘branded house’ – a place that consumers understand has a distinctive handwriting, one that tells them where they are.

Simple to say perhaps and an essential part of being a department store if remaining in the game is the object of the exercise.