Back to the drawing board
Michael Sheridan is the founder of retail design company Sheridan & Co. A design engineer by trade, Sheridan has spent the past 25 years working with brands to design, produce and install permanent
retail furniture, tester bars and fittings for promotions and launches.
One of Sheridan’s first projects was working for French beauty brand Clarins in British department store House of Fraser; Clarins has remained a client of Sheridan & Co’s in the UK domestic market ever since. Sheridan has also worked for big names in travel-retail like William Grant’s Glenfiddich, and his company has also just completed the designs for a beauty spa at Heathrow T5 in association with
British Airways.
What can Sheridan & Co offer brands?
Often brands will come to us and say that they want to do something a bit more edgy and strategic that will help them to either differentiate their brand within the mass of the whole cosmetic or beauty offering, or that they can use to help sell their products in a different way to their neighbours in the store.
What kinds of brands do you work for?
We specialise in beauty – in 1983 our first customers were beauty companies and now 90% of our
business is in that sector. We offer knowledge, a real passion for the sector and total product experience.
Our markets are mainly North America and Europe, but for brands like Laura Mercier we manufacture for them worldwide – producing all their tester bars and every single update and promotion.
We also do a lot of work for Procter and Gamble, mainly on the fragrance side. The majority of the work is in the UK, but they keep us very busy – they already represent 18-19% of our business across different brands. We’ve also done a lot of work in Selfridges for SK11 and we do a huge amount of
promotional work for P&G.
Would you take on any beauty brand?
We position ourselves at the top-end of the market. If someone from a mass-market brand wanted to work with us we would probably think twice about it. If they were trying to trade up or to make their brand more premium with repackaging or relaunching, then we may well be interested.
Recently we’ve looked into working with other types of distribution and we’ve just started doing some work with Superdrug – but again we’re working with the top section of their products. We’re definitely in the part of the market where brands are competing with more than just price.
Is it challenging designing for travel-retail?
The biggest challenge is dealing with the volume of people that go through the airports. The units experience a lot of wear-and-tear and so we have to use materials that are more durable. That’s a challenge sometimes because cosmetics companies are quite precious about their imagery and they will have specific materials they want to use to maintain that imagery, which aren’t always designed with the travel-retail environment in mind.
When we’re designing for travel-retail we also have to make sure that promotions are flagged up well, and it’s important that once the consumer has tried the product it’s very easy for them to find it on the shelf. I would be an advocator of keeping the testing with the actual product it’s promoting.
How do you measure the success of your projects?
Our clients come to us because we’re mature enough to talk about what we’re trying to do, which is to help them make money. Design is very important to us but we know that you can have something that looks good but it also has to help sell the products.
At the end of the project we ask our clients “how are your sales doing?” and we will drill down quite far to find out because cosmetic ranges are quite broad and it might be that our customers are selling a lot more lipsticks but they’re not selling many more foundations – in which case we’ll look with them and see if there’s something we can do to help that.
We’ve had feedback from our clients that has given established brands anything between 300-400% sales increases. In a roll-out situation, we are basically looking for our clients to at least achieve or better what they regard to be their target for that period.
We’ve heard that you like to incorporate new technologies in your designs...? [Sheridan & Co has pioneered the interactive tester bar, a unit that can be a standalone or built into retail furniture. When a product is lifted from the display it activates a corresponding video, which provides key product information.]
The interactive unit is a completely unique application. Brands like Aramis and Lab Series have used it, and now we’re hoping to do something with Boss.
For colour and skincare it’s very important to try before you buy. The bigger brands have beauty advisers, but there’s such a density of people in travel-retail that it’s not sufficient to rely purely on them. If a customer is not getting the advice from staff they will wait for a while and then move on. The interactive tester bar would work well in this situation as a holding device for keeping people at the counter.
There is also another stage of development under way that will involve having broadband and being able to have live conversations about the product.
Can we find this tester bar in travel retail yet?
We haven’t used it in travel retail yet, but in that environment it would work in two ways: where you have a consultant it helps to ensure that when they go through the selling proposition they can follow the text, and from a brand perspective that’s good because it means the marketers are able to ensure a consistent message is given to every consumer. When you don’t have a consultant, on the other hand, you still know that the major selling points of your product are being put across. In travel retail, where people are moving through all the time, that’s really important.
We’ve had the technology out in test in the domestic market for a year now and it’s working well.
Do you think technology will feature more heavily in travel-retail in the future?
There are things that can be done in travel-retail by using technology and the internet. For instance, giving passengers exposure to what is on the airside to start them thinking about the purchasing process earlier in the programme – perhaps before they’ve checked in or even when they’re booking the flight.
Brands or retailers could offer the sort of service where you start to buy before you get to the airport. Airlines are now offering pre-order facilities and they have quite a wide selection of products, but there are a huge number of products that aren’t available on the planes. What we’re suggesting is virtual shopping to an extent – it could be a hybrid between Argos and travel-retail. I know that sounds like two things that are massively far apart but it’s about finding a way to make that initial retail encounter easier for people to access.
How do you make sure you are ahead of the game?
We have an innovations section and we give them projects to work on that are of interest to our customers. Our interactive tester bar came out of such a project – the brief was originally to look at how we can communicate expensive skincare products to male consumers.
We are also now looking at how we can make selections more ‘green’, for instance. The reason for having the London office where it is is that it puts us very close to one of the biggest retail environments in the world. So we do a lot of shopping! In terms of researching travel-retail, we are constantly travelling – I’m due to go to Japan in October. Wherever we need to be, we’re there. n
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