Savills real estate insights: the rising importance of experience for physical retail destinations

Sybarite Co-Founder Simon Mitchell recently joined Savills’ Real Estate Insights podcast to explore the rising importance of experience within physical retail, and how design can create greater relevance and commercial value.

Hosted by Marie Hickey, Global Retail Research Lead at Savills, the conversation brought together Simon; Laura Clowes, Director in Savills’ Global Cross Border Retail team; and David Wilkinson, Executive Director of Oslo’s Steen & Strøm department store.

Against a backdrop of increasingly selective investment in physical retail, the discussion explored what experience means today: from localisation and personalisation to food, culture, community and unexpected collaborations between brands.

For Simon, the challenge facing physical retail has fundamentally shifted:

“The challenges are no longer e-commerce. E-commerce is yesterday’s battle. The battle today is for people’s time. They want culture, they want community.”

The conversation also considered the role of architecture in bringing these elements together, with Simon describing the store as a setting in which every part contributes to the overall experience:

“It’s like a stage. Products become the cast, brands the storytellers, customers the participants, and the building hosts the performance.”

As brands reconsider where and how they invest, the discussion returned to a deceptively simple question: does the store still make sense? Increasingly, its value lies not simply in what it sells, but in its ability to offer something distinctive, relevant to its location and worth spending time within.

The conversation builds on themes explored in Sybarite’s Future of Experience report, examining the relationship between experience, design and value in the evolving physical retail landscape.

Listen to the full episode via Savills Real Estate Insights: https://www.savills.co.uk/blog/article/393691/podcasts/real-estate-insights-podcast–the-rising-importance-of-experience-for-physical-retail-destinations.aspx