Anne Badger Dissertation

Nature of Business The aim is to create a retail space for a brand that partners with a hub of brands for women’s fashion.

This space will directly face issues in women’s sizing and show how to get consumers back into the high street by creating an environment that allow users to feel comfortable and excited to go shopping again, especially after a pandemic (DeWitt 2021). This tackles additional issues such as; how is technology included in design, and how can brands be more sustainable in retail by the services they offer?

After looking into what services are missing, the spaces that will be included are informed through research into retail. Enhancing a shopping experience supporting and encourage women to engage with the high street and high-end brands. Some examples of these services follow:

Figure 6- Burberry opens it’s first luxury retail ‘social store’ and its women’s interior

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Target Audience The target audience is based on the focus of the project which is encouraging women to start shopping in high-end high street brands again and having the confidence to feel like they can trust the brand to have clothes that fit them. The brand is focused on women with more disposable income to pay for a more premium service but is not exclusive to those people as the business is trying to capture the attention of those from lower classes to expand their customer base. The target audience is aimed towards adults; young, middle-aged, and older women. There is opportunity to open the brand to younger girls in the future as this would help with the issues in sizes for younger girls and children that don’t fit into the clothes designed for their age, but this may add to the problem of influencing body image issues growing in the younger generations due to the changing culture and trends in the UK (The Children’s Society 2020). The shop is open to passersby as it is in the city centre of Newcastle which allows potential customers to see the variety of services available which may interest them. The brand will offer chic high-end clothing with a streetwear twist; Street-chic.

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Figure 7- Fashionable Woman- Street Chic Style

Critical Design Analysis- Burberry The Burberry flagship store in London is located on Regent Street. Designed by the Ramboll Group, Burberry’s 2012 completion of its flagship store spans across 44,000sq ft with four floors and 26 staircases (Ramboll, 2012). Originally built in 1820 for the Prince Regent, it is housed in a grade II listed building on the west side of Nash’s Regency Curve.

It is divided into rooms that mirror their online store like its acoustic and bespoke experiences. It has been designed to reflect brand heritage with their new technological forward ethos. As seen in figure 15, Ramboll engineered one of the world’s largest indoor video screens and reinforced the glass roof.

The staircases in the interior were remodelled by inserting cantilever steel arms at strategic points to reduce the overall length to achieve the look they wanted. The central staircase wraps around the 22ft screen and hydraulic stage.

The space has been designed to be a shopping destination with a multi-media experience.

Throughout there are 500 hidden speakers which play thunderstorm sounds in Burberry’s weather moments with digital rain showers. It is an events and innovation hub with livestream catwalk shows and one-off gigs chose in their cultural programme.

They brought British craftsman from stonemasons to cabinet makers to create a true depiction of the British history of the brand.

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Figure 14

Figure 65- High-end streetwear by Supreme

Another report found that ‘three fifths of Baby Boomers visit stores less to try on clothes compared to before the pandemic, compared with over half of Generation X’ (Mintel 2022). Despite this, garment fit and issues around sizes remain ongoing for fashion consumers (Mintel, 2016) as brands aren’t actively trying to tackle the issue (Lawrence, 2019), and ‘many designers and highstreet brands still don’t cater to sizes bigger than a 12, even though the average dress size in the UK is a 16’ (Spedding, 2019). A large part of mainstream fashion that has been becoming popular in the last decade is street style. Street style Pinterest boards and Instagram accounts ‘across the internet are dominated by the same thin, cis, white women, with a few influential women of colour sprinkled in, and, very rarely, maybe a plus-size woman’ (McCall, 2018). Even with less fitted and shaped clothing that street style adopts, sizing is an issue with a massive gap in representation for all women.

This leaves the opportunity for more sample sizes, models, and marketing within street style brands to be pushed which Fawn & Co can incorporate and push to a larger target market, satisfying sizing influencing positive purchase behaviour.

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Survey The first section of the survey directly answers the question of ‘how does sizing affects purchase behaviour?’, and the second section answers ‘how does retail store design affect purchase behaviour?’ by addressing opinions on clothes sizing and design features within each store from the participants.

For the sizing section, 28.6% rated 3/5 that they enjoyed shopping for themselves as well as 28.6% rating 5/5. When asked if the latest fashion is always in their size only 13 participants rated 5/5 with a majority of 28.6% rating only 3/5. 33 participants rated either 4 or 5/5 for having problems finding clothing that fits well with only 4 participants voting 1/5. When asked if garment sizes are the same across all brands no one rated 5/5, with a 66.7% majority for 1/5.

Question 5 was split across all 5 ratings with 34.9% rating 3/5 and 25% rating 1/5 to ‘the garment size label affects my purchase behaviour’. 40 participants rated 4 or 5/5 when asked does ‘the size label affect my feelings about my body’.

63.5% said they would use a sizing service and 81% agreed they would feel more comfortable, in question 8, using 3D body scanning technology in-store than a store assistant taking their measurements. Those who answered no to question 8 followed up with reasons such as having ‘anxiety’, ‘I don’t want to know my exact measurements as it would make me feel uncomfortable with technology scanning me’, and ‘I would rather buy based on my own comfortableness as I have become customed to know what sizes fit me in other shops’. 84.1% preferred 6-22 numbered sizes rather than ‘small, medium, large’, and 61.9% prefer both a range of brands in-store and their own brand of a larger sizing range compared to 7.9% preferring stores to have just their own brand.

Figure 81- Google forms survey 75