Visitor numbers were up, novelty was down, but Euroshop remains a must-visit event. John Ryan reports from Düsseldorf

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It’s quite easy to do Euroshop. Get off the plane, jump in a taxi and carry out a hurried inspection of each of the seemingly endless halls that sprawl across its many hectares (1 hectare = 2.471 acres for those not of a Continental bent). If you do things this way, the chances are good that you’ll end up little wiser than when you passed through the electronic turnstiles, although given the distances involved, you will certainly have sore feet.

The cannier visitor selects what to visit prior to arriving at the world’s largest shopfitting and fixtures, visual merchandising and retail technology show - you just can’t do everything and hope to understand all there is.

For the purposes of brevity therefore and in an attempt to offer some kind of meaningful commentary on the Düsseldorf proceedings, it made sense to restrict the ambit of a three-day visit to visual merchandising, shop equipment and lighting: so vast was the scale of what was on show.

By way of additional information, it is perhaps also worth noting that rustproof shopping trolleys (yes, an entire display was devoted to trolleys permanently enduring a heavy shower) and freezers that preserve huge amounts of fake food, are alive and well. But this was for aficionados of other parts of the in-store panorama.

Those who came in search of novelty would quite possibly have been disappointed. Rodney Fitch, formerly chairman of Fitch and now professor of retail design at Delft University, said: “I loved it for its size, for its pizzazz, for its completeness. I don’t think there is anywhere where you would find an industry so completely investigated. But when it comes to providing a window on the future, this time it didn’t. I think that the previous three years have hit the R&D departments of manufacturers and we are seeing this.”

Novelty may have been a little thin on the ground therefore, but trend-seekers were having a field day. Some areas were very definitely on-trend, while others seemed to be falling by the wayside. The winners were probably the green lobby, in the form of LED lighting, and the shopfitters, all of whom seemed determined to ensure that nobody went hungry with on-stand restaurants and celebrity chefs wherever you looked. The big loser seemed to be visual merchandising in the form of mannequins - all within hall 4.

Sustainability was a key issue across the entire show with suppliers falling over themselves to demonstrate their green credentials. A cynic might consider this a little puzzling, if only because Euroshop is an event in which suppliers and manufacturers stampede to cover more than 1.15 million sq ft of space with exhibition stands, only to knock them down again days later.

Peter Franks, director of store development, Primark said that there is value in visiting and exhibiting: “I actually thought it [Euroshop] was very good. There was a lot of lighting, as there often is and this time, this meant a lot of LED and LED screens. There’s still a way to go with some of this, but it was interesting. I quite liked the LED screen that Philips had produced - it had a very sharp image.”

On the question of the cost for companies of setting up temporary shop in Dusseldorf, Franks commented: “If it’s only once every three years, you must over the time, begin to get some payback.”

Lighting

At the last Euroshop, three years ago, LED lighting was hardly a new technology. But it was one not much used by retailers - principally because the total life and reduced energy consumption argument didn’t prove sufficiently robust to overcome fears about the cost of installation.

However, if there was one lesson of Euroshop 2011 it had to be that the retail future will be LED-lit for no better reason than that almost every manufacturer that had taken space was showing little else and also that prices are coming down. And without going into the technicalities the diversity of LED retail options means that if Euroshop is a guide, then this is the way forward.

Talking of the show’s success from a lighting perspective, Philips retail segment manager Caroline Easton said: “Footfall to the stand was extremely high, which generated a significant number of new business leads for us. We were delighted to see how many more retailers are embracing the benefits of LEDs since the last show.”

Jonathan Morrish, sector manager of the retail lighting division at lighting company Erco, echoed the sentiment: “Our main thrust was LED - our whole stand was lit by LEDs, which used less electricity than the cappuccino maker that we had in situ.” Overall, a green and good-looking series of displays therefore from the lighting manufacturers.

Euroshop themes

Less emphasis on mannequins andfewer displays

Shopfitting and store equipment remain at the heart of retailing with new technology becoming an integral part of it

Store lighting over the next three years will be dominated by LED

Real novelty was thin on the ground, but there were clear changes of emphasis on how to treat the in-store landscape

Designers are in demand, judging from the Designer Village

Shop equipment

As always seems to be the case, halls 12 and 13 - home to the major shop equipment manufacturers - proved major draws. In part this was certainly due to the scale of the stands and perhaps in no small measure to the standard of the refreshments that was on offer.

The biggest presence was that of Austrian shopfit giant Umdasch, which occupied a space the size of a small supermarket and that, according to a member of staff, was costing E512 for every minute that it was open during the show. Sipping a glass of middle-European red at one of the many tables on this stand, it was easy to understand the German ‘meet clients and arrange appointments’ modus operandi. At the next table was the Waitrose delegation, while Tesco had just cruised through and looked at what was on offer.

Swiss shopfitting giant The Vitra Group had also put its best foot forward with stands from its Vizona and Visplay companies. Both of these measured more than 4,305 sq ft, and were consistently busy, although as elsewhere, the emphasis seemed to be on slick presentation and manufacturing capability, rather than genuine product innovation for retailers.

And nobody visiting the area would have been able to miss the Schweitzer stand, a down-home middle-European fake store with another restaurant at its heart: all beautifully executed. The real question mark in all of this has to be why do German shops look so generally lacklustre when things in the German-speaking store equipment world look this good.

Perhaps by association, the Designer Village area was also located in this part of the show. It was filled overwhelmingly by UK and German design companies, and almost every UK retailer visiting the show stopped off to talk with the likes of Fitch, Dalziel + Pow, Campbell Rigg and Lumsden Design, among others.

Mannequin world

Hall 4 was designated on the outside as ‘Mannequin City’ and walking through any of the entrances it was easy to see how the name had been arrived at. This is normally one of the Euroshop highlights owing to the nature of the merchandise on offer. But for 2011 this was a diminished presence compared with last time and it was hard not to wonder why Rootstein, one of the major forces in the sector, and traditionally a large space user, was signally absent.

There were, as there always are, oddities, not least of which was the entrance to Dutch manufacturer Hans Boodt’s stand that, under the strapline ‘Creating Characters’ showed a group of ultra-realistic male figures in their Y-fronts - arresting, but unlikely to be gracing chain store windows in the near future.

In total, this was a smaller showing than in previous years and although it was worth looking at, Mannequin World was substantially less dramatic than in 2008.

Nevertheless, visiting Euroshop always matters and record attendee numbers demonstrate the show’s continuing relevance.