Why is it that retailers seem hell-bent on opening flagships and sometimes little else?

Why is it that retailers seem hell-bent on opening flagships and sometimes little else?

What follows may seem like a mild exaggeration, but in the last week there have been at least three “flagship” stores that have opened or been launched…and all of them are in London.

On Monday last, Debenhams unveiled the £25m interior makeover that it has given to its Oxford Street leviathan. On Thursday, West Elm, the fascia owned by US homewares group Williams-Sonoma opened its first store in Europe, this time on Tottenham Court Road.

This may or may not be given the flagship tag, but it does cut a bit of a dash, is new, and would therefore be afforded fleet-leading status – even though there is signally no fleet yet.

And on the same day, Cath Kidston flung wide the doors of its flagship – on Piccadilly. At 7,000 sq ft and trading from two floors, this one is four times the size of the average Cath Kidston store in the UK, although there is a 4,000 sq ft contender that the retailer has opened in Shanghai.

Further afield, Morrisons opened a whizzy store in Preston although it would probably shy away from the idea of calling it a flagship because, curiously, flagships seem to have no part to Play in supermarket fleets. The point, however, is why, in the run-up to Christmas, are there so many flagships grabbing the headlines?

One answer might be that it’s about raising eyebrows. Retail is posited on making people look at things they might not otherwise consider and there are probably few better ways of doing this than a very big shop with the best visual merchandising that a retailer can muster.

This creates problems for other stores in a chain however. Whenever a flagship opens, it raises expectations about what is possible in the “branches”, and all too frequently, these are likely to be frustrated as the twin constraints of budgets and time come into focus. For those with access to a flagship, all is sweetness and light. For others, it’s a case of non-wish fulfilment.

A head buyer I once encountered commented that in terms of figures a number of a retail chain’s branches were “average” and that he wanted them all to be “above average”.

The problem is that for this to be achieved, the notion of what is average also shifts upwards and there will therefore always be below average stores. In general, flagships are a good thing, but they can be the source of considerable angst in non-flagship locations. On the plus side, perhaps they serves to raise standards overall. Retail destination nation seems to be where we are headed.