Where Brum leads, London follows at Harvey Nichols
ANYONE who remembers the Mailbox in Birmingham before it underwent a £50 million facelift will know the most important thing one had to remember on a shopping trip was an umbrella.
But, after more than a year of redevelopment work, the boutique, high-end mall is sporting not only a shiny new roof but a swanky Harvey Nichols department store.
A much bigger store with more products, new layout and a proper restaurant have set it apart from its city rivals in the retail category of this year’s Birmingham Post Business Awards.
General manager Richard Vickery said that the way the store had innovated after the redevelopment of the Mailbox helped it to catch the judges’ eyes.
“We have created a very different take on the traditional department store by offering a large but comfortable boutique,” he explained.
“Rather than the normal ‘shops within a shop’, where a brand owns a space, it is very much a Harvey Nichols envelope where we guide people around and have lots of staff on hand to make their shopping experience amazing.
“There are eight Harvey Nichols stores in the UK and Ireland and a number of international stores such as Dubai and Kuwait.
“But in Birmingham we very much benefited from our chief executive Stacey Cartwright, who took over three years ago, as this was her first new store, providing a great opportunity for the new vision.
“The timing was perfect and enabled us to be very ambitious and innovative and try lots of new ideas here which we’ve then seen introduced in the menswear area in our store in Knightsbridge. So London is following Birmingham.”
Harvey Nichols was founded in 1831 and came to Birmingham when the old Royal Mail sorting office was transformed into the Mailbox around 16 years ago. It now displays more than 200 different brands. Mr Vickery added: “Now, we have proper restaurant in the store, a Sponsored by and with the revamp of the Harvey Nichols and the wider Mailbox with the Everyman cinema, customers can make a real day of it.”
The runners-up were Hitari Trade and Selfridges.
Hitari Trade is a UK based retailer selling 30,000 products, including video games, consoles and accessories, PC components, health and beauty products, home appliances, mobile accessories, consumer electronics and many other gadgets.
The company is based around integrity and reputation and provides a minimum of 12 months warranty with its products.
It has a separate eBay store, which is ranked as one of the top five selling on the website, and has recently been approached by Amazon to open an outlet shop.
Selfridges is a high-end department store with a rich history dating back to the early 1900s.
The Selfridges store in the Bullring shopping centre is home to more than 100,000 product lines and over 700 designer brands.
In 2015, as part of its regular marketing activiti es, the Birmingham store launched a Live + Loud festival to bring together local and national talent while promoting products across all of its brands.