Oxford Street and Bond Street remain popular with luxury retailers looking for bricks-and-mortar sites, as investment volumes increases in the UK capital.
Data, from commercial real estate firm CBRE, showed that investment volumes in central London rose 71% quarter on quarter to £424mn during Q2 this year.
Furthermore, the RetailX European Luxury 2024 report highlights that luxury shoppers seem wedded to physical retail and its sense of theatre.
Part of the experience of shopping for luxury among the well-known brands has always been that the store experience – from beautiful architecture and design to free champagne and canapés – has gone hand in hand with browsing and buying the finest things.
While the pandemic did its best to stymie this, with stores closed on and off for close to two years, the sector has maintained a strong physical retail presence – a presence that has bounced back from lockdown to be even stronger than before.
Consumers in Europe still prefer to use the physical retail store to shop luxury, with 48.4% of them choosing to do so – put in front of online and mobile – and with the sector generating 85% of its revenues from physical retail.
Physical luxury stores offer the epitome of instore retail experience, with the shopping format as luxurious as the goods they sell. This has long been the stock-in-trade of many of the well-known luxury brands and it clearly continues to possess an appeal to shoppers.
However, this isn’t as binary as it might at first appear. The pandemic years saw consumers embrace a more digital-physical shopping model and, with stores closed, luxury brands invested heavily in creating exceptional online and mobile ecommerce offerings. Today, with stores open and consumers still having a penchant for instore luxury shopping but with a taste for the ease and convenience of ecommerce, the digital and the physical forms of retail have come together.
This is an excerpt from the RetailX European Luxury 2024 report, authored by Paul Skeldon.
The report follows on from our Global Luxury 2024 Report, and takes a deeper dive into consumer behaviour and attitudes in this region. It uses the results of our ConsumerX data to analyse attitudes to what, why, where and how Europeans’ buy luxury goods.
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