Bread Line Design

Today while weaving my way through a packed town shopping centre I caught sight of an over sized 50% off sign adorning a belegured Woolworth’s store. Being the credit-crunched designer that I am I wasn’t about to pass up on the chance of some cheap xmas pressies, and having seen the articles about the chains imminent demise I crossed the threshold and immersed my self in all things Woollies.

It’s been years since I’d visited Woolworths but It didn’t take long to see where the store was going wrong. Basic things were missing, like cleans floors and clear divides between product lines. To many of the shelves had vast empty gaps, and with no staff on the floor there was no one to ask for help in locating products. But the devils in the details, and here too they failed. The DVD’s didn’t have cellophane wrappers, giving the place a blockbuster feel, and the grubby HI-FI playing the in-store music was all to obvious behind the counter. Even the tired in-store branding felt wrong, with the red and greys harping back to a yester-year of beige PC’s and inflatable furniture.

The store should be the ultimate brand experience, the place where the consumer is literally “inside” the brand, and when details slide it’s not long before the experience suffers.

That said It’s easy to be negative, to point the finger and claim “I saw this coming” as many a neigh-sayer is currently saying. But in truth Woolworth’s biggest problem has been plain for all to see for some time: It never really new what it was, or more accurately, it never really came to terms with what it had become. As a generation of pick-n-mix kids matured into iTunes and Play.com shoppers, Woolworths continued blissfully unaware of the cultural shift beneath its feet, proffering to be a jack of all products instead of a master of one.

What’s worse is all the the warning signs of a consumer shift were there. Not two years earlier Halffords and Comet launched slick online stores and rebranded, aiming squarely at the lower end of their respective markets while. Marks and Spencers rebranded to hit the middle class shopper, and HMV streamlined it’s identity and introduced instore smoothies and Mac’s with internet access to entice the bebo generation. The best Woolworth’s managed was a short run TV ad campaign featuring a puppet called…wait for it…Wooly. No D&AD awards there then.

I hate seeing good brands fail. Every store knocked off our high streets is all to often replaced by another American equivalent, but when brand complacency sets in and the marketing message becomes confused a sticky end is all to often the outcome. Woolworth’s failure to consolidate their image and drive it to the public left them weak. Sadly it took a credit-crunch to finish them off.

I love classic card design, so a while back I designed an ace of spades, and more recently an ace of hearts. I’ve included both below. I hope to eventually design a full deck over the coming months, and I’ll post up my efforts as I go.