FEATURE

Shopping for success

By: Rob Fletcher

Working together has always been a core value of the industry, but given the events of the past 18 months, this is now more important than ever. Rob Fletcher takes a look at how the relationship between retailers, shopfitters and designers is key to successful projects in retail

While retail has, and always will be, an incredibly competitive industry, there are plenty of examples of companies partnering up to do great things together. Be it running a unique marketing campaign, installing innovative displays in store or incorporating new, digital technologies to appeal more to consumers, teamwork plays a key role in the success of many projects.

For this reason, striking up alliances and relationships with other companies will help you to achieve your own goals. This is particularly true for retailers, shopfitters and designers, which rely on each other to ensure projects run smoothly and are delivered on time.

Here, we speak with some of those companies that have successfully partnered with others and find out more about the value of these relationships and the benefits they offer. “Quite simply, framework and project success cannot be achieved without strong working relationships and a truly collaborative approach with a shared intent to deliver upon the clients’ objectives

Having a good relationship doesn’t mean that you have to agree 100% of the time.”

Resolution Interiors worked hand-in-hand with design studio YourStudio on a project for Virgin Holidays

Collaborative approach

One such company is Resolution Interiors, a national turnkey fit-out and refurbishment specialist that works across both the public and private sectors. Account director Mark Jones and field design manager Emma Fullegar recognise the importance of collaboration when it comes to projects in retail, saying the success of jobs depends on these relationships.

“Quite simply, framework and project success cannot be achieved without strong working relationships and a truly collaborative approach with a shared intent to deliver upon the clients’ objectives,” Jones and Fullegar said.

“If a designer or fit out contractor fails to understand the needs of their client, or build trust, they will not remain a supplier for very long. When it comes to the designer and the contractor relationship, it should be symbiotic in nature and support an interactive process.

“Nobody wants to get to the end of the process and find much of the design is compromised due to budget parameters. Equally no one wants a contractor shutting down ideas too early within the process, and limiting the design based purely on practical challenges such as ease of installation or commercial consideration.”

While all of this may be true, how do you go about approaching companies to form such a relationship? Jones and Fullegar said this process is no different than when starting any form of relationship, in that it begins with getting to know one another and really seeking to understand a client’s needs, challenges, motivations and goals.

“It is always our intention, to integrate with our clients’ company, brand culture and values to act as a true extension of their team,” Jones and Fullegar said. “This is certainly true whether we are starting as the designer, or the fit out contractor.

“When it comes to working with designers and architects, we like to be part of the project as early as possible so that we can bring our extensive experience and engineering know how in retail build and refurbishment programmes to assist and underpin the development of the concept.”

In terms of putting these collaborations into action, Jones and Fullegar offer up a number of examples of its recent successes. These include the completion of a concept design through to build project for Leek United Building Society, whereby Resolution Interiors and its partners were successful in winning the bid.

“We conducted many early investigative workshops with the Leek United team to really get under the skin of the brand, and the people it represents and serves,” Jones and Fullegar said. “In our view this early phase of insight mining, understanding, outlining scope and striking trust is critical to the success of any project and should not be overlooked.”

An example of where Resolution Interiors worked hand-inhand with a design studio is for Virgin Holidays, where it teamed up with YourStudio.

“This relationship is all about early engagement and ongoing communication so we can deliver upon the aspirations of the design without compromising the intent,” Jones and Fullegar said. “This often means that we need to start investigating how to make ideas come to life, at concept stage, and ahead of getting to a final signed off design scheme to assist on, material and technological innovations, feasibility, practicalities, sustainability, budget and production timelines.

“A good example of this is when we worked, to deliver the virtual experience seats – giving customers a taste of the Virgin Holiday experience from the shop floor.”

Resolution Interiors recently worked with a number of partners to complete an overhaul of one of Leek United Building Society’s branches

Problem solving

Elsewhere and Portview is an interior fit-out specialist that has worked with a number of the world’s top brands in retail, hospitality, health, sport and business, including Tiffany & Co,

Portview is an interior fit-out specialist that has worked with the likes of Tiffany & Co, Samsung, Rosewood Hotels, Wimbledon, Tottenham Hotspur, UAL and Harrods

Samsung, Rosewood Hotels, Wimbledon, Tottenham Hotspur, UAL and Harrods.

Managing director Simon Campbell said as projects are built on trust, they are only made possible by adopting a collaborative approach, with all parties needing to work closely together in order to understand the project vision and deliver it to a standard that everyone can be proud of.

“At Portview, we pride ourselves in having a high level of repeat business and are passionate about ‘making the client’s job easier’ when it comes to project delivery,” Campbell said. “This is achieved by taking the time to listen to and understand the needs of the client and designer so we can ascertain a strategy that will focus on fulfilling them successfully and to a high standard.

“Having a good relationship doesn’t mean that you have to agree 100% of the time. It means that the contractor, client and designer can talk through problems and present their concerns openly and honestly to develop solutions together for the greater good of the project. Therefore, potential issues can be resolved quickly and effectively without incurring unnecessary delays or costs.”

When it comes to starting up such a relationship, Campbell said with any client or project, it is important to lay the foundations and get to know who you are working with and build up a rapport. To do this, Campbell said Portview encourages its Simon Campbell, managing director of Portview, said building relationships can help to resolve any potential issues without incurring unnecessary delays or costs

clients to have a number of discussions in the beginning so that it can extract as much information as possible and take ideas from their minds to make them a reality.

“Building relationships with individuals, whether they are the decision-maker or not, is equally important as everyone makes a valuable contribution to each project, no matter what their role is,” Campbell said. “It’s important to us that everyone feels part of one large, integrated team rather than a series of smaller ones, so we can all focus on achieving the same project goals and objectives.

“With an international supply chain to consider, many projects will involve stakeholders from different continents and time zones also, bringing its own set of challenges. This further emphasises the importance of establishing strong communication channels that everyone can tap into from anywhere at any time.

“One way we manage this is by using building information modelling (BIM) to help make the clients’ visions a reality by creating a virtual prototype of the proposed project, so everyone has complete visibility of a space, right down to the smallest details.”

Building on this, Campbell said BIM has brought a lot of new design language and acronyms to the construction process, as well as a large amount of model information. At times, he said this can be overly complicated and overwhelming to the majority of the project team when it really doesn’t need to be.

“At Portview we have simplified the entire process to create clear pathways for the wider project team and supply chain so they can all view, understand and feed into the model information remotely and in real time.

“Alongside the pandemic and the movement to digital meetings, this approach has manifested in the wide use of the model in most - if not all – meetings, bringing a wider understanding and range of benefits for clients and projects.

“For example, we used it to help Samsung create a versatile experience zone that adapts to its changing needs, and we are currently using it on the large university project UAL to collaborate with the other trade packages.”

While the ultimate goal of a business is to be as successful as possible, achieving this will more often than not require working with other companies. By developing relationships with other companies, you can help each other realise and achieve your individual goals.