Jack Wills Fouberts Place as Featured in Retail Week
7th March 2011
'Where there's a Wills, there's a (new) Way''.. As reported by John Ryan, Retail Week
Fouberts Place was completed and handed over to our clients, Jack Wills late 2010. Situated near Regents Street, it was another store which we were proud to be associated with in relation to fit out of the intricate details required by the in house designers at Jack Wills. The store has attracted much media interest, and recently was featured in an article as reported by John Ryan at Retail Week. The following article has been referenced from Retail Week.
The first room is womenswear, although there is a lot that might be worn by either gender, which is absolutely the Jack Wills norm. A dark open-fronted wardrobe is filled with Jack Wills sweatshirts, all bearing the company name across their fronts, folded so that only the word “Jack” or “Wills” is visible. The floor is wooden parquet and a lingerie-clad mannequin lounges on a Victorian-looking chair set on top of a table, while the cash desk is an exercise in making the counter look as if it’s been there for half a century, rather than around half a year. In terms of propping, things are what you might expect with polo mallets casually stacked against one of the mid-shop pillars while the framed pictures that fill the wall behind the cash desk are an exercise in retro and nostalgia.
This branch of Jack Wills may look like what many would consider a standard iteration of a now reasonably familiar format, but it is rather more than that. Jack Wills brand communications director Tom Evans says this is a “concept” store and walking out of the first room and into the area beyond it, it is apparent that this is the case.
In place of yet more dark wood and faux-naive visual merchandising there is a jolt as you enter an industrial area. You might be inclined to say that this part of Jack Wills has quite a lot in common with certain branches of Urban Outfitters or perhaps Superdry certainly some distance from the preppy norm. The shopper is confronted by a much bigger area where glass, colour-coded steel, raw concrete and spotlights are all used, creating a feeling a long way away from a normal Jack Wills. And to set the scene, in the immediate foreground two headless mannequins, with togged up preppy style, stand behind a bank of DJ mixing sets while multi-coloured wires tumble down from above, entangling them.
Evans says Jack Wills is about very “British heritage juxtaposed with a modern hedonistic university life”. He adds that in the “Soho” store, the design team had to be “supersensitive to the structure of a building formed of two parts. It’s like there’s a sliding door that takes you from a traditional Jack Wills interior to a more modern expression of that juxtaposition between old and new. We’ve been faithful to the spaces within the building and this means that the back of the store is almost like a warehouse.”
By any standards, this would be a pretty fancy warehouse, but it is an interesting departure for the “University Outfitter”, although whether it will sit with the brand values normally associated with the brand is a moot point. The rest of the ground floor continues the Hoxton warehouse theme with electric guitars parked against the wall, tables with black metal legs and unfinished wood frames around parts of the perimeter. It looks interesting, but does appear a little at odds with the clean, scrubbed nature of the stock that is on display.
Head upstairs and the raw concrete ceiling supports and exposed cable trays also appear curious, albeit worth looking at. The wall behind the staircase that takes you up to this level has been painted with broad pink and navy stripes - a signal that you are still in a Jack Wills store. And at the top of the stairs a long table proves a support for three Apple monitors where shoppers can surf the net. Again, it feels as if there is some kind of disconnect between the female varsity stock shown on this floor and the surroundings that house it. You cannot fault Jack Wills for attention to detail though; every square inch has been considered. And a little like the ground floor, pass through an arch and you’re back in more traditional Jack Wills territory with an Edwardian fireplace and a winged armchair in which a female mannequin sits, supported by a Union Jack cushion and with a 1940s standard light completing the picture.
Finally, there is the basement where it’s playtime with table tennis tables and brown leather club chairs. As this is a pseudo-industrial basement, lighting is provided by standard white fluorescent tubes and there are style magazines on the rack attached to the whitewashed, exposed brick back wall….the Soho store is worth a visit if only to observe what a brand can do when it decides to act out of character.