Review: The Future of the High Street
High streets are under great pressure from many forces that is driving a doom-laden narrative about their impending death but this is thankfully being offset by an increasing recognition of the vital role they play in local communities, which is fuelling optimism about their future.
At the recent The Retail Bulletin ‘Future of the High Street 2025’ conference in central London, the thoughts of Darren Sanderson-Williams, general manager at Specsavers, reflected something of a consensus: “I owe 35 years of my career to the British high street. We should all care about our high streets. They look completely different to 10,20,30,40 years ago but they are still massively important to communities and life. I’ve been blown away on a recent trip to Wales by what our stores do for the local communities. High street stores are so much more than shops.”
Building a business on kindness
Tara Carlile-Swift, founder and managing director at Freckleface, says her business was built on “kindness” and around building communities, with physical stores playing a crucial role: “Everyone thought we were insane when we opened a Stamford [Lincolnshire] store during Covid-19 and then three more stores during this period.”
Never Miss a Retail Update!“We’re fighting with big organisations and we add in the bits the larger ones don’t. It’s about community…and adding more than a transaction. We build communities around connections. It’s very easy to just focus on numbers rather than humans,” she says.
Carlile-Swift is a big advocate for charity shops as she says they are the epitome of sustainability, ethics and are about the community. “They take in volunteers and train people. They give back to the community. This is more than having recycled logos on your products.”
Robin Osterley, chief executive at the Charity Retail Association, says they also offer a safe place for people: “Once a month Barnardo’s stores will have a child walk in looking for help.” Growing recognition of the value of charity shops has led to most planning to open further stores in the future. In 2022/23 they enjoyed record sales, according to Osterley. “Charity shops do an incredible job of providing variety. We appeal to shoppers wanting something different,” he says.
Adaptability and flexibility
Lord Moylan, opposition transport spokesman at the House of Lords who was formerly the chair of the Built Environment Select Committee that published the ‘High Streets – Life Beyond Retail’ report in late-2024, understands this situation. He says he has a high level of optimism for high streets as long as they have a level of adaptability and flexibility. This involves them not simply offering a standard mix of retail.
Local authorities are crucial to this because they are often involved with licensing, planning, highways, markets and are often landlords too for properties like libraries and town halls. “High streets could be energised with things like NHS diagnostic centres, doctors’ surgeries and street markets should be encouraged,” says Lord Moylan, adding: “They need to be accessible. Parking is of considerable importance. Most importantly they need the vigorous spirit of private enterprise. Commercial spirit makes them more attractive.”
Pop-ups have become one way for this spirit to be given a trial on high streets to test the appeal of businesses. Stacy Chan, founder & managing director at PLATFORM Store London, has operated a number of pop-ups in central London incorporating her own brand and other complementary brands who in more recent pop-up iterations rented space from her in these outlets.
After much adaptation of the model Chan says the company has settled on Marylebone as a permanent store location in the capital: “We hit our stride in Marylebone with our ethical, sustainable fashion. People did not mind not knowing the brand and they understood the quality of the brand.”
Take a chance on us
She is particularly grateful to the landlord, the Howard de Walden Estate, for “taking a chance on us” because there was a lot of competition in the area from better known retailers and other landlords would not have taken the risk on a young business with a lesser covenant than the large operators.
Raishma Islam, founder & CEO of Raishma, also found Marylebone an ideal location for her fashion business around which she is trying to build a community. A component of this is the flexibility with how the store is used: “The store is a brand identity, it is used for events, it is where customers can meet us and understand our products and sizing. It’s primarily a showroom rather than a store. It’s only small and we have a lot of inventory so customers can buy online. We’re flexible and versatile with the store.”
Romain Roulleau, group digital & e-commerce director at Kingfisher, has also embraced flexibility across its stores with an omni-channel model that enables appointments to be made in-store for shoppers to complete the journeys they started online for projects like new kitchens and bathrooms. Click & collect is also available across its store network including, unusually, the ability to return into its shop any unwanted goods bought from third-parties on the Kingfisher marketplace.
For Eva Pascoe, director of e-commerce at Bluebella, the issue of returns is particularly worrying because she suggests the combination of platform like TikTok and AI is making returns worse due to the mirage of content they are creating. “It’s not creating a reality. I spent years working on colours and accuracy of products online but now with AI-made content it is getting worse. It is AI slop and it’s a big challenge. Everything looks good on TikTok. It’s a war between the mirage and reality. It’s a nightmare for customers and returns.”
Personal experience
This is all a far cry from the experience of customers at the Raishma store where the interactions can involve free styling advice that helps build those one-to-one connections that customers really want. It is a level of service you can’t get online. “It’s a personal experience. We try to give people time that they can’t get in larger stores,” says Islam.
Ricky Green, chief commercial officer at Sealskinz, agrees this is what is needed – especially by Gen Z’s – who are attracted to the likes of Gymshark and Lululemon. “It’s a lifestyle/vision that’s being sold. They want to be part of a community. The high street can give this whereas the internet can’t do this.”
He adds: “We have to accept high streets will change. It won’t be the same shops. You have to create places where independents and [things like] mending stations can be found. It’s being part of a community. All high streets will be based around being community hubs.”
Sharaz Khan, head of operations at New & Lingwood, recognises this situation and suggests the most memorable thing about a purchase is the experience. “All customers need the experience. It’s a great opportunity to upsell too. It can be difficult to do this online as the customer controls the basket.”
Career opportunities
Khan says one of the issues with delivering a memorable in-store experience is the challenge of staff turnover. Linda Campbell, former global retail director at The Body Shop, says: “We definitely need to remove the negativity around retail now. We need to reinforce the fact you can come into retail and have an amazing career. I’ve ended up on the board. How do we make the younger generation, or someone flip their career, to come into retail? We need to empower people to do what they want to do.”
Deborah Ormondroyd, retail and people director at Bird & Blend Tea, agrees: “People fall into it, but there’s so much variety. It’s interesting and fun. Every day is different. I feel strongly we should be doing more [to retain people].”
The starting point for Ormondroyd is to listen to employees to find out what they genuinely want. “It’s hard to please a diverse group but we shape the business to what they want. Some people want knowledge on pensions, flexible working hours, or extra holidays. These things make a difference to people and hopefully this retains them,” she says.
The desire for flexible working is recognised by Michael Spataro, chief customer officer at Legion Technologies, who found in a survey that 70% of hourly workers regard flexible working as critically important: “Young people say they would leave to go to a flexible employer. It’s about listening to employees and acting upon it or they will leave.”
With technology and AI the process of scheduling can now be automated and take into account employee preferences and other factors that ensure employer and employee enjoys a positive outcome.
For Penny Grivea, former managing director at Rituals, the approach involved showing employees a clear career path. “I’d interview everyone. People would say I was micromanaging but it made people feel involved. I’d also spend a day a week on the shop-floor and encourage the rest of the team to do the same. Be transparent and let everyone have access to the numbers,” she explains.
Safe working environments
Retailers also have to create a safe workplace for employees, which has become a greater challenge in recent years with the dramatic rise in instances of theft and aggression towards team members in stores. David Pardoe, former head of profit protection at The Works, ponders what went wrong after 2020 that has seen such an escalation of serious incidents and offences.
He says the challenge today is how to protect colleagues and that retailers now increasingly have facial recognition and cameras rising up their agendas. “Sweating every available advantage from AI is a given,” he says, adding: “Retailers were mumbling about it some years back but now they are compelled to grab every ounce of technology. They need to look at the behaviour of a customer before they enter the store.”
Pardoe brushes aside the issue of privacy around facial recognition and cites his previous projects where there had not been a single request for information on the practice by customers. He has implemented body-worn cameras and the model adopted involved the cameras being switched on only when the employee felt the need to record the situation. “As a Society we are now used to seeing cameras around and people on social media [brazenly] stealing goods, which means people are now more accepting of it,” he says.
Lee Bagnall, former CEO at Blacks Leisure Group, recalls implementing such cameras at the company’s 25 worst stores and it proved to be a successful deterrent as offences decreased. Such examples are resulting in more retailers introducing the kit, according to Dinesh De Silva, head of sales for UK Retail at Reveal Media, who says: “We’re seeing more interest from retailers in body-worn cameras. When we see a drop in activations of cameras being switched on then it’s a good thing because it means it is working as a deterrent.”
He says the company is also seeing a shift to using AI in order to recognise individuals who it knows would impact colleague if they entered stores. Pardoe agrees: “Lots of retailers are on proof-of-concept with facial recognition. It is here and AI-powered cameras will be integrated across different systems in retailers.”
Embracing all customer types
This safe workplace for employees also, obviously, makes it more welcoming for customers too. This is even more of an imperative for disabled shoppers who number 16 million in the UK when factoring in neuro-divergent individuals who represent a growing number of the population.
Rebecca Posner, director of research at the Research Institute for Disabled Consumers (RIDC), says the ‘purple pound’ is worth as much as £274 billion per year and is an amount that retailers could be missing out on because most disabled people cannot shop in the stores they would like to, which means they are forced to seek out alternatives – often online.
“It could be simple things like the tills being too high. Accessibility can often be forgotten. Disabled customers often just go to the large supermarkets. They can be the most loyal customers when they find a store they can access,” says Posner, who adds that retailer’s loyalty schemes can be used to strengthen the relationship with this all too frequently overlooked customer grouping. They can be used to ask people about any accessibility issues and possibly enable them to book in-store assistance.
Cooking up collaborations
Although Sarah Buchan, head of VM at AllSaints, says the retailer has a loyal customer base the company wants to engineer some growth and has found pop-ups, events and collaborations can be very successful. A recent collaboration involved fish & chip shop chain Poppies. “It’s not an obvious one but these are often the most successful. Doing these different things reaches new audiences. It’s not just about sending more new clothes into a shop.”
For some customers a collaboration will be a one-off interaction when they buy just the Poppies t-shirt whereas for other people they will see other things when they are in-store. These can then become future regular, loyal, customers. In addition to buying goods Martin Ward, head of software for UK&I at Toshiba Global Commerce Solutions, says there is also the upside of a collaboration or an event generating a follow from the customer on social media that also grows the shopper base – and increases the opportunity for driving future sales.
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