Retail cleaning for a new age
The rise in online shopping has forced today’s retail centres to up their game and offer customers enhanced experiences. Essity’s Stuart Hands asks: how does this affect the cleaning challenge?
For many of us, a trip to the shops is a necessary evil rather than a pleasant outing. But thanks to online shopping we no longer have to put up with the pain of struggling through crowded stores and queueing for the checkouts, before battling our way out of a congested car park. Instead, we can now carry out much of our shopping from the quiet sanctuary of our own home.
But this has put huge pressure on retail centres. Some high streets have become little more than ghost towns while many retail units stand empty in today’s shopping precincts.
However, it seems that the shopping centre is gradually fighting back. New retail complexes are appearing up and down the country – ones that are barely recognisable from the shopping centres of 10 or 20 years ago.
Gone are the stark shopfronts and canteen-style cafeterias, replaced with retail concepts, pop-up stores, food courts, intimate coffee shops and high-class restaurants.
Gone are the harassed shoppers hurrying through the crowds to finish their shopping as quickly as possible: instead there are customers leisurely playing table tennis, giant chess or table football on equipment supplied by the facility.
Teens are taking time out from shopping to visit the cinema or the climbing wall, while parents are keeping their youngsters entertained in the soft play area or by equipping
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them with a tot-sized electric car that they ‘drive’ around the centre behind their parents.
And the perfunctory plastic chairs that used to be left out for weary shoppers are also gone, and in their place are plush armchairs and comfy sofas where people can sit back and surf the internet to line up their next purchases.
And this is the crux of the matter: today’s successful shopping centres are recognising that they cannot compete with the internet. Instead they need to harness its benefits and create spaces that build on, and even improve, the online experience.
There are several examples of situations in which the twin worlds of ‘bricks’ and ‘clicks’ can be found co-existing in harmony. For example, beauty brand Glossier recently launched a pop-up studio in an 18th century Marylebone home. The company sold its skincare, make-up and body products in an ‘instagrammable shop’, attracting a great deal of social media attention and drawing hundreds of ‘likes’ on Glossier’s Instagram account.
Meanwhile, fashion brand Missguided has moved from being an online-only brand to operating a new Bluewater store. Here it is developing new ways to engage with the public via floor-to-ceiling digital screens that display customer-generated content under the hashtag #babesofmissguided.
twitter.com/TomoCleaning
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