The new J Crew store on London’s Sloane Square may have some work ahead of it

How do you make a splash when you set up in a new market?

If you’re an international retailer looking to come to the UK, one of the options currently might be to take a unit on Regent Street. This is what preppy US fashion retailer J Crew did at the end of last year. It also opened smaller units, one for men and one for women, in East(ish) and West London.

Job done then and for a while, it garnered a lot of column inches as the fashion mob wandered around the Regent Street flagship.

Meanwhile, the menswear unit, on Lamb’s Conduit Street seemed devoid of shoppers – perhaps due to the fact that prices are a little intimidating and that no reference is made on the store exterior to the fact that this is J Crew.

Last week however, another part of the J Crew UK strategy was unveiled when it opened a store on ritzy Sloane Square.

Like the Regent Street shop, this is a two-floor affair, although not as big as the flagship. Nonetheless, its upscale location would provide a set of expectations about what the visitor would be likely to find when an inspection is made.

The problem however is this. A member of staff commented that there was almost as much menswear stock in this store as in Regent Street - almost.

Yet the space allotted to this is considerably smaller. Indeed, to the uninformed eye, this might appear a distinctly mid-market proposition, such is the density of the merchandising.

Space buys class and, in some measure, is what shoppers at the better end of the retail spectrum expect when asked to pay hefty prices.

Go against this and it matters little how well merchandised things are - the sense that things should be inexpensive will begin to assert itself.

Now couple this with perimeter open-wardrobe units where the holes that allow the shelving to be adjusted are visible and the feeling is one of modularity. This looks like rollout time and the ambience of the Regent Street flagship has little to do with what’s on view here, no matter how winsome the stock.

So here’s the rub. Somewhere, there’s a trade-off between high price, use of space and customer expectations.

An initial reaction to what is being offered by J Crew on Sloane Square is that things shouldn’t be as pricey as they are. The tills were not busy on Saturday, in sharp contrast to the Club Monaco shop across the square – also a new arrival and with a lot more space…