Ultimate Outdoors is the latest store offering from JD Sports, caters for everyone heading for hill, fell and lake. Retail Week takes a look.

Think JD Sports and the image that may be conjured up is one of training shoes, casual sportswear that is likely to be worn as everyday clothing and perhaps a few shoppers who really are interested in sports.

The chances are they will be in the minority, however, because the JD fascia is really a destination for the fashion shopper who likes sportswear – the kind of person who wants to look sportif.

But the JD Group also owns camping and outdoor retailer Blacks, which heads away from sports and caters more for hardy outdoors hiking types.

And for those in search of outdoor clothing and footwear, camping, cycling or fishing paraphernalia – or indeed anything else that might be associated with the great outdoors – there is now a JD Group store to cater for everything.

Welcome to Ultimate Outdoors, a shop on British Land’s Deepdale Shopping Park, on the outskirts of Preston, which has been open for just under a month.

The store is on two floors and, on initial inspection, stands out from its neighbours owing to the heavy use that has been made of stained wooden planks to clad the fascia. They provide the surround for large plate glass windows that show off both floors, with the divide between the
levels demarcated by a green strip on which a series of icons details what’s in store.

On the windows there are graphics trumpeting the ‘Great British Summer’ (it was grey and overcast on the day of visiting) and an abstract depiction of mountains.

Ultimate Outdoors, Preston

Location: Deepdale Shopping Park, Preston

Owner: JD Sports, acquired in January 

Size: 10,350 sq ft

Ambience: Wooden

Opened: July 2014

Reason for visiting: Branded width of offer

Enticing prospect

There is also a logo and a sign advertising the ‘Ultimate Cafe, The Interesting Eating Company’. While this is open to some ambiguity, it does have the merit of making it a rather more enticing prospect than many of the bleak frontages of its immediate Deepdale retail park neighbours.

And, to the right of all of this and superimposed on the wooden planking, there is a list of all the brands on offer including a logo for Trek, the bicycle brand, which has a shop-in-shop in this store.

Head inside and probably the first things the visitor will notice are three bikes – two for off-road use and one racing machine. The prices are relatively modest, although at £300 for the racer this is not mass-market entry level. What the bikes do, for those who didn’t notice the cycling icon on the store exterior, is highlight that this is a shop with bikes, a fact that might be easy to overlook if the shopper failed to venture up to the first floor.

There is a large cash desk with a picture of mountains and a lake (Preston is roughly an hour’s drive from the Lake District) backing it. Like the store exterior, almost every element of the ground floor is wood-clad, with green, 3D signs placed around the floor to help shoppers find their way to that part of the outdoor activities world that is their particular favourite.

On this floor, all this means camping equipment, clothing – branded, for the most part – and, at the back, an area with a wooden chalet-like roof, which is home to footwear – for which read walking and hiking boots. In the middle of the latter area there is a small wooden ramp on which shoppers are encouraged to test-drive the stock on a gradient, although this is very limited in terms of space.

Next to this, numbers contained within squares have been applied to the floor with the words ‘Kids Only’ by the side. It’s a hopscotch grid and, although there were almost no children in the store, it might serve to amuse when they are around.

The floor also carves out space for luggage, with rucksacks displayed in raw plywood pigeonholes around the rear perimeter wall making a somewhat mundane category more interesting.

Upmarket offer

Moving upstairs, shoppers may pause to consider the display that fills the wall on the staircase landing between the two floors. This is composed of a series of raw wood frames into which products have been placed, ranging from an upended bike to a map and repetition of the words ‘ultimate’ and ‘outdoors’.

Broadly, the selling area of the first floor is largely divided between bikes and fully erected tents. The Trek bike shop-in-shop has an offer that runs from around the £300 mark, but for real enthusiasts there is a mountain bike that tops £3,000 and a racer at more than £2,600.

“For the really deep of pocket there is the chance to customise a Trek bike”

John Ryan

The overwhelming majority of the bikes are Trek branded, with a few Dawes models thrown in for good measure. This is a high-service section of the shop and for the really deep of pocket there is Project One – a board with colours and options allied to a computer that enables the shopper to customise a Trek bike.

According to the member of staff on duty, this could mean spending up to £15,000 on a bike, which does sound a lot.

The tents that fill much of the rest of the floor are, in general, not family tents, tending instead more towards the cling-to-a-rock-face-in-a-force-10 variety and lending credence to the outdoor nature of the store.

And so to the Ultimate Cafe, which turns out to be a fairly standard affair, albeit well patronised. It has been designed to dovetail with the rest of the store in terms of ambience and, once more, it’s a matter of raw wood being put to work in the service of paninis, pancakes and suchlike.

Whether this is the ‘ultimate cafe’ is certainly debatable, but it does at least have the merit of providing a break from working out which Ordnance Survey map to buy or whether it’s going to be a two or three-man tent.

On the face of it, Preston might seem  a curious location for a trial outdoors store. When the city’s hinterland is considered, however, including large tracts of the Pennines, then things begin to make more sense.

This is a world away from JD Sports and quite a distance removed from Blacks. The claim that it is the first store to cover everything for the outdoors devotee, from fishermen to climbers, is a bold one when the offer from Decathlon is considered.

That said, as a proposition that trades almost entirely from a branded position, it is unusual and the range and displays are certainly impressive.

JD Sports bought Ultimate Outdoors, which had previously been independently owned and online-only, in January 2014. It certainly widens the group’s overall proposition. It will be interesting to see how quickly this appears in other locations.