UK. Alpha’s Glorious Britain brand has opened its largest outlet yet.
The new 1163sq ft store is located airside at London Gatwick Airport’s North Terminal, and opened last month.
Excellent initial sales are being reported and Alpha said it expects the location to become one of the chain’s key sites. Glorious Britain already operates a landside outlet at Gatwick, as well as five stores at Heathrow Airport, one at Stansted Airport and one in Windsor town centre, opposite Windsor Castle.
2005 has been a busy year for the souvenir and destination merchandise retailer. Earlier this year, the store at Heathrow T1 was refitted to adopt the new store branding (first seen in Heathrow T3 just over two years ago) and to boost its appeal to the changing passenger profile seen over the past 12 months. As part of the store overhaul, the food offering has been enhanced and rebadged “˜Food Glorious Food’.
According to Glorious Britain Marketing Manager Ben Deller the demand for souvenirs varies greatly among core nationalities and flight destinations. This shapes the nature of the products on sale in each airport store. Thus, flight movements from T4 and T1 in 2004 had a significant impact of the passenger profile mix. In addition to increased sales, the category sales mix was also affected.
Deller said: “We saw a major increase in the sale of our food gifts. Typically traditional British food is most popular amongst European visitors, while Americans tend to prefer to take home clothing, especially t-shirts.”
“Given the changing profile of the passengers now coming through terminal one, we have expanded our food range and created a dedicated “˜Food Glorious Food’ section selling a range of our most popular items, including teas, jams and shortbreads.”
NOTE: Glorious Britain will be featured in ‘A Sense of Place’, a major print and online publication coming from The Moodie Report in October. In it we examine those airports and retailers that have strongly championed their country’s or city’s crafts, products, tastes and traditions and truly conveyed ‘A Sense of Place’.
MORE STORIES ON ALPHA
Alpha Retail Catering makes its debut at Nottingham East Midlands Airport – 25/07/05
Alpha invests £350,000 in improved retail and food & beverage offer at Inverness airport – 21/06/05
Alan Edwards joins Alpha Asia as Buying Controller – 13/06/05
Alpha Airports Group sales rise nearly +8% in first 17 weeks – 02/06/05
