A new lighting scheme and a flexible power system play key roles in the latest look for children's retailer Mothercare, which began rolling out the format last month. We report on the pilot project in Rotherham.
While Mothercare may be a perennial name on the UK high street, recent years have seen its market squeezed. Supermarkets have muscled in on the lucrative nappies to buggies market, and clothes retailers like Gap, H&M and Next have downsized their offer to create highly successful miniature replicas of their adult ranges.

Late last year the retailer began to address these issues with the launch of a pilot store concept in Rotherham, which is acting as the test bed for a wider roll- out that began last month and has put flexibility of services high on the agenda.

The 1500 m2 out-of-town format is located in Rotherham and was designed by Leicester-based Checkland Kindleysides, a major practice in the retail sector. With Mothercare, the design firm resumed its long-standing relationship with retail operations director Vince Gunn, who previously worked for travel operator Lunn Poly. A year earlier he and Checkland Kindleysides had collaborated on an innovative flagship store for Lunn Poly at Fosse Park, Leicester, which incorporates zoned vacation areas, ambient sounds and smells, and an interior design completely removed from the usual transactional design of travel agencies.

At Mothercare the brief was again to create a more contemporary and emotive environment, updating the in-store colour palette and improving navigation and zoning areas to help customers to locate products. Key to this was creating the flexibility to remerchandise the area. Mothercare had already halved its trading size, splitting its original unit in two as a prelude to the building works, which enabled it to continue trading for the five- and-a-half weeks of the project.

Goalpost units have been developed – moving walls that act as dividers between products and visually break the store into departments while retaining the flexibility to allow the store manager to expand or contract particular trading areas. This mobile, merchandisable frame can be closed by positioning gondolas underneath to form a solid partition, or left open to create a threshold between two related departments. Given the large size of the retail shed, this allows the store to be split into more intimately- sized areas.

Each unit contains low voltage dichroics to highlight the products below, and a promotional end unit for key product ranges. Integral power sockets were pre-wired, allowing the units to be moved anywhere and plugged in to low level power sockets on the perimeter system set up by electrical contractor Adcrest, which handled the project through its Bolton office. "The brief from Mothercare was total flexibility," says contracts director Bob Cogger. "They were aware that they would need to reconfigure the store pretty regularly and wanted to be able to do this without an engineer. We achieved this by installing a Telemecanique busbar at 4 m centres, which allows the goalposts to be moved anywhere and plugged back in."

This is particularly important as there are no floor power sockets in the store and, at Christmas, this concept enabled the retailer to use the goalpost system to increase the toy department by 5%, while retaining its shop-in-shop feel.

Lighting for the main floor area has been achieved using high bay pendant luminaires, while merchandise downlighting is concealed behind the shelving fascia and unit arms. "We developed a 1·5 m aluminium extrusion to conceal the 70 W CDM-T lamps and then tailor-made outreach arms to which the lamps simply clip in," says Ken Ingrey, project lighting engineer with Profile Lighting Services. "This gave us an average 1000 lux top to bottom on the shelving, against a brief of 900 lux minimum."

The Rotherham store also piloted the use of a raft system to act as a visual ceiling. With the interior a basic shed, Checkland Kindleysides developed the idea to reduce the height without going to the prohibitive expense of fitting a false ceiling. Contractor Adcrest again used busbar for its flexibility, and 35 W CDM-T gimbals plus a compact fluorescent- based lighting system create an ambient level around 200 lux below the perimeter lighting levels. This raft system is being further developed for the current Mothercare World project in Bristol.

Lighting is also used to highlight the cash tills and counters, while recessed low voltage spotlights have been fitted in a false ceiling feature above the cafe – an adult-oriented area that includes an internet zone where customers can access the retailer's web site.

Adcrest now handles energy management for Mothercare, another new aspect introduced for this scheme. "We centrally monitor lighting, heating and signage from our central control room," says Cogger. "It means we can literally turn the lighting to its full level a minute before the store opens and we can handle seasonal changes with downloads from our central pc rather than the store staff having to do it."

"Rotherham has been a huge step forward for our out-of-town proposition," maintains retail operations director Vince Gunn. "The four main focus areas that have driven our success have been based on increased flexibility, better in-store communications and navigation, new graphics to leverage the emotional power of our brand and finally cost – a 20% reduction from our last concept store."

While the scale of the Rotherham outlet means the design is very much oriented around an out-of-town format, the principles will be adapted for high street sites: annual sales at Rotherham have improved between 6% (clothing) and 41% (maternity department).

"The customer experience at Rotherham Mothercare is really a quantum leap forward," reflects Gunn. "It means that customers have an easier time of actually trying to buy in a Mothercare store and to see just how good the product range really is."