Last week on a wet Wednesday afternoon we took a trip to the eagerly anticipated opening of Kiddicare in Nottingham. The store is situated on a busy retail park in the city nestled between a well established Mothercare and a large fronted Carpetright.
The car park was very busy and pretty tight – not great for getting in and out of the car with a bump, buggy or both.
The store makes quite an impact with its bold turquoise fascia and green price promise arrows that look suspiciously like ASDA signage.
The doors are wide and this makes up for the lack of window space. When we visited there was an army of welcoming team members at the door, all with badges displaying their names and their own kiddie connection – Mary, nanna to two, and Katie, great baby sitter, were two of my favourites. At the front of store there is a large customer service area with staff busy directing shoppers to all points of the store.
The key areas for me on product breadth and unrivalled selection were buggies and car seats. The buggies are everywhere, from shelves to the roof, to the test drive track. There are even buggies dangling from the ceiling. If you can’t find the pram for you here I’m not sure where you’d find it.
In the car seat area there’s a baby cinema for kids to watch cartoons whilst Mum and Dad are being briefed on the wide array of options in car seats and there’s a handy measurement tool to check your kids’ height to make sure you get the right car seat for your child. Staff seemed pretty up to speed on regulations and even told us about what was required in Europe, but beware they only speak in centimetres.
There’s a really clever bit of merchandising in the stair gates section where the gates are merchandised so you can have a go at opening and walking through them. Great POS messages inform mums that if the product is too heavy someone can help carry it.
If I had one slight disappointment about the store I think it could be more inspiring in the nursery and room sets section – I felt this was an area that Mamas and Papas still do so much better. Given the store footprint of the new Kiddicare stores, I would have liked to have seen more inspiration and the ceiling lights looked like an afterthought. It felt like there was an opportunity for more high end product and opportunity to inspire- especially if granddad and grandma were part of the shopping experience, which on our visit was clearly the case. There’s work to do on branding, with both Baby Weavers and Kiddicare brands appearing around the store, with little to highlight differentiation or value.
The VIB room and the event spaces look fantastic and underline Kiddicare’s service proposition in a true and meaningful way. The store has a number of interactive kiosks for ordering product, though there was an underplay on how this makes shopping easy and perhaps misses the opportunity to underline the spectacular service proposition of Kiddicare in home delivery – maybe this is clearer when you buy the product from the colleague.
The clothing section was unsurprisingly the busiest area of the store. Price and branding here varied wildly with top end organic product merchandised cheek by jowl with Baby Weavers mid market clothing. In Nottingham the space for clothing is really tight and when more than two or three buggies are in the aisles, the section would be difficult to get around. It will be interesting to see the impact of Nutmeg as it unfolds into Kiddicare stores – will this provide a broader range from basics to special occasions?
Though early days, Kiddicare’s physical presence looks set be a welcome addition to the baby retail market and should give rivals reasons for concern. Certainly for first time parents setting out to buy everything they need before their pending arrival, Kiddicare is keen on price and has clear destination status due to its outstanding range authority and strong customer service. There’s also much opportunity still to be unlocked in leveraging the retailer’s multi-channel potential.
We see a challenge to overcome in giving those first time parents compelling reasons to come back to the store time and time again as their children grow up – getting clothing right will be crucial to this, with Nutmeg surely having an important role to play.
We look forward eagerly to the opening of the retailer’s second standalone store in Dudley scheduled for December.