Kitchenware retailer Steamer Trading Cookshop’s gleaming new store shows what can still be done in a depressing retail climate. John Ryan takes a look at its impressive visual merchandising

With the exception of retailers that have signed for units in some of the larger shopping schemes that are still to emerge from the property development pipeline, the number of merchants opting to take on new store commitments must be pretty limited at the moment. After all, with negative like-for-likes, heavy markdowns and eroded margins all becoming pretty much the norm, why on earth – for the time being at least – would any retailer decide that opening more UK branches is the right thing to do?

However, there are exceptions to this broad series of generalisations and one of them is Steamer Trading Cookshop. This is a small but rapidly growing chain of shops selling – as the name might suggest – everything from Dualit toasters to collapsible colanders. And it does so from 18 stores, where the visual merchandising is dependent largely on the internal geography of the individual branch, meaning that each of the shops is something of a one-off.

Its latest outlet is in Marlow, an intensely affluent upper Thames Georgian-cum-Victorian town and the terminus of a single-track branch line that starts in Maidenhead, about four miles away. Look around the two or three streets that form Marlow’s centre and there are not many chains – with the exception of Waitrose – mid-market or otherwise. Instead, there are a lot of independents and a series of small traffic jams in which golden retrievers and children stare out of the windows of large cars in roughly equal numbers.

Marlow is in fact the clichéd Thames Valley settlement that causes resentment almost everywhere else and where the credit crunch is understood, but where hardship is not just around the corner. And at its heart is a Steamer Trading Cookshop store, which opened two weeks ago and trades from 3,000 sq ft (280 sq m). Managing director Ben Phillips opted to buy the site rather than take a lease on it and prior to his arrival the building had been, at various stages in its life, The Crown Hotel, a fire station, a market hall and even a lock-up for local hobbledehoys.

Phillips, who bought Steamer Trading Cookshop from his parents in 2001 following his decision to quit his post as a managing director at the then-named Credit Suisse First Boston, is nothing if not enthusiastic. “This is where Jerome K Jerome wrote Three Men in a Boat,” he says. “I bought it freehold and took possession of it at the beginning of July.” Phillips is clearly a man prepared to put his money where his mouth is and he says that, prior to leaving Credit Suisse, he banked all his bonuses for several years, enabling him to pick and choose, as well as own about half of the shops that he trades from.

And with a Grade II* listing, the former Crown Hotel has been quickly turned from a somewhat down-at-heel inn into a shop where customers will probably buy something if they walk through the door, even if they go in just to have a look.

From the outside, this is a stone-built structure where shoppers can gaze through plain, plate-glass windows into an interior in which much of the original fabric of the building is still evident.

The shop front is formed from three stone arches. This is echoed internally by a shop divided into two parts, with the front portion of the space containing a cash desk, knife display and tables of merchandise, followed by an arch that provides access to the larger area at the back of the shop.

From the outset it is apparent there has been no skimping on design or fixturing. Phillips, who worked with an architectural practice to realise his vision for the interior, says if he sees something in another store that is worth imitating, he will copy it shamelessly.

In the store’s front half, one of the most arresting displays is the knife wall. Expensive-looking blades are contained within an internally lit glass-fronted cabinet on the right-hand wall, which extends from a waist height shelf, home to knives and knife blocks, up to the ceiling. It is worth noting the colour scheme for this cabinet, because it typifies much of the approach taken for the rest of the shop. The wooden planks used to form the cabinet’s back wall have been painted a gunmetal grey, setting off the matt steel of the knives in front of them. There is nothing flashy about this. Instead, shoppers are presented with a subtly tasteful answer to the problem of how to make an essentially mundane kitchen hardware category appear glamorous. Phillips says that in professional kitchens knives are stored on a magnetic bar for ease of access. In this shop, the display contains two of these, creating an impressive and imposing effect.

In front of all this are several wooden tables, artfully piled high with brightly coloured merchandise. The types of kitchen implements involved are irrelevant, because the point about this shop is that wherever you look, the visual merchandising will make you stop and stare. Phillips says: “How many shops have you been into where you take a quick look around and decide: ‘It’s not for me’? I defy anybody walking into this shop to do that.”

He has a point and looking across the rest of the front section of the shop, the eye is pulled towards the cash desk, a simple wooden structure with curved ends backed by a Welsh dresser-style wall fixture that runs from floor to ceiling and is filled with culinary wanna-haves.

Head through the arch and it’s more of the same but on a larger scale; the floors are oak, the perimeter is filled to capacity with open-sided wardrobe fixtures and at strategic points throughout, walls have been left unplastered, allowing the original stone- and brickwork to be seen.

Two features stand out – the comprehensive Dualit display that could be a show-stopper in itself. The first is on a right-hand wall and is a mock-up of the front of the building in the form of a shelving unit, complete with a functional clock on the gable that sits on the store’s roof. It is filled with objects that would undoubtedly find shelf space in any kitchen but which are, in essence, gifts.

The second is a back-lit wall of mugs at the rear of the shop. These have been arranged in such tight formation that the light behind them is only really visible as a series of bright cracks separating one mug from another. It does mean a glamorous display and one that Phillips says will never really pay for itself. At about a fiver a throw and in a store where every square foot is accounted for, it is clear that this fixture is about wow rather than wads of cash.

All of which is germane. Phillips betrays his merchant banking background when he appears to know what every shop in his chain takes (in terms of pounds per sq ft) and what he would like it to take. This should be best practice for every retailer but rarely is and is one of the reasons why Steamer Trading Cookshop has been profitable from the off.

Phillips has appointed agent Reid Rose Gregory to find stores to take the business’s portfolio to 30 by 2011 and, given the results of the Marlow branch’s first weekend’s trading, where the figures were 60 per cent ahead of expectations, this could be a credit-crunch defying format. Everything about it is the vision of one man, whether it is the interior design or the thousands of SKUs that comprise the range. This is what good retailing is about: control, execution and a very strong sense of what a competent offer should look like and how it should be merchandised.

  • See more pictures of Steamer Trading Cookshop - and more than 1,000 images of all the stores in Retail Week - with commentary by store-design expert John Ryan on our Stores Image Gallery.