A fitting role

The last thing Kim Morris wants is for a customer to walk into a John Lewis shop and rave about the fixtures. 'Customers should be wowed by the product not the fixture. If it is the other way round then I've failed,' she says.

As Head of Retail Design, getting the fixtures to fade into the background is just a small part of Kim's job which covers everything you see when you walk into a branch except, she concedes 'the merchandise and 2D graphics'.

But Kim is keen to stress that she is a shopkeeper, not a designer. 'Even as a child I wanted to be a shopkeeper and I'm still passionate about the job,' she explains.

'I look at everything with a shopkeeper's eye. Design must complement the product, not detract from it. It should always deliver two things – ease of shop and inspiration – otherwise it just doesn't have a place.'

But Kim's early Partnership career was heavily skewed towards the shopfloor.

'Direct customer contact is really important to me, so at first I wasn't sure if being away from the shopfloor would suit me. But then I realised that everything I do in this job is for customers.'

Kim, who joined the Partnership 20 years ago, confesses that she found it a bit of a shock when she moved from a John Lewis Welwyn to head office where she worked as Development Manager.

'For the first six months I pined for the shop and the customer buzz. But then I began to understand the scope and scale of the work being done here. Now in my current job I work across such a broad remit that it gives me real scope to influence what will be happening on the shopfloor.'

What helps keep the buzz going for Kim is the constant – and accelerating – pace of change in the branches. 'For some years John Lewis's "handwriting" was stable and probably a little old fashioned but we have woken up to that and for the last eight years things have moved forward fast,' she explains.

'We have done extensive work on upgrading our existing estate and the new shops are at the forefront of retail design. The product must always come first but the environment that frames it is vitally important.

Kim'll fix it

'Our shops must be simple to navigate and make it easy for customers to select product,' continues Kim. 'Customers trust us – which is extremely important – but they also want excitement and that's something we have not always been good at giving them.'

But not any more. A look at the newly refurbished selling floors at Bluewater, with their bigger and bolder merchandising, shows just how far the design dial has been turned up since the shop opened 10 years ago.

A £21.9m refurbishment of the branch has just been completed this month. Apart from the opening of a foodhall in new selling space in the basement, it unveils a number of new concepts and layouts including a complete revamp of women's fashion.

The revamped department will have four zones – contemporary high street, classic, casual denim and designer. Each will be defined with different finishes to make it easy for customers to identify the separate offers and merchandising will be less rigid with more table displays.

'For the first time we will be using large-scale photographic images on the shopfloor featuring the merchandise. But it won't be presented by brand, but from our point of view – the John Lewis way – promoting the idea of John Lewis as an independent department store.'

Bluewater and Cardiff will be the first branches to get the new-look fashion floor and it comes with the launch of Fashion Online where, by the end of the year, around 70–75 per cent of the division's fashion assortment will be available online.

Kim believes that John Lewis has now achieved a good balance, split pretty equally into thirds between fashion, home and EHT. In all these areas, new and exciting concepts are being developed.

Simplification

'We are simplifying [the home department] and making it easier for customers to navigate round the department. But we are introducing more prominent home design and service desks if they need help.'

In EHT, too, a new concept aiming to help customers understand the full scope of the product they are buying – whether it is a television or a digital camera – is currently being trialled in Oxford Street.

'People buy a digital camera but then really don't know how to store or view the images. We want to make it easy for them to see all the possibilities from buying a digital frame to printing out the photos.

'This is true of everything from computers to televisions. We will be bringing all those linked products together on the shopfloor but equally importantly we will be giving Partners extra training so they will be able to inform customers about how to get the best out of the new technology.'