Trip to London

In order to conduct some primary research myself & a coursemate decided to take a daytrip to London. The main reason for my trip was to visit the recently revamped formalwear section of the House of Fraser Menswear department in Oxford Street.

I'd read about the revamp in Drapers & seen pictures - it looked incredible! The theme was an old-school 'gentleman's club' and I was interested in seeing how they had achieved this. The department has had rave reviews in industry articles, and House of Fraser have decided to roll the concept out to more stores, with Glasgow already completed. I was interested to see whether the shopping environment could create such an experience and added value that the customer enjoyed visiting the store and wanted to purchase there.

There was a lot of information to take in, more than I can put on here, so I took my tutor's advice & decided to do a Drapers style shop report. This will mark out of 10 certain aspects of the department such as product mix and visual merchandising, and take an indepth look at what works and what doesn't. The shop report is coming together nicely (ie. it's almost done, seems to be taking far longer than expected - as everything FMP related seems to do) Below are just a few images from the department - I particularly loved the lushious deep brown leather armchairs, mahogany furniture and mirror plated chest of drawers...





Everything from the wallpaper to the lighting emitted a feeling of old fashioned luxury, and the products were well displayed and easy to navigate. This kind of department layout is definitely something I could take inspiration from - I want to redesign a concession area in John Lewis and this kind of thing, to me, is super exciting!