Habitat to roll out more mini stores in Sainsbury’s supermarkets
Habitat has unveiled plans to launch four more mini Habitat shops in Sainsbury’s stores by mid-November as it looks to create a network of regional touchpoint stores to help support its multichannel growth strategy.
These will include openings within Sainsbury’s supermarkets in York, Manchester, Newcastle and London to take the total to ten.
The 2,000 square foot stores will follow the same footprint as the brand’s six existing mini store-in-store formats.
With over 60% of sales now being made online through the Habitat website, the retailer is looking to grow brand awareness with Sainsbury’s customers as well increase online shopper confidence by allowing customers to ‘touch and feel’ the quality of the products in convenient store locations.
Each mini Habitat store will have an edited range of over 600 products, all designed by the Habitat design team in London, with a range of price points across furniture, upholstery, lighting, homewares and textiles.
Customers will also be able to browse the Habitat website on integrated in-store digital screens and iPads that allow them to access the full product portfolio of over 4,500 products.
Clare Askem, managing director of Habitat, said: “We’ve learnt lots of lessons from our six trial Mini stores in Sainsbury’s this year and these have been addressed in our upcoming store openings. We’ve refined our product range based on customer feedback, while our in-store visual merchandising and service proposition has been adapted to what customers want on a ‘weekly shop’ basis.
“Our customers increasingly want choice, flexibility and speed and we are evolving the brand into a truly multichannel business that allows customers to shop how and when they want – be that online, in-store or a combination of the two.”
Habitat is currently increasing its digital services and recently launched a click and collect service where customers can pick up over 3,000 small homeware products from over 2,000 Sainsbury’s locations.
Askem added: “We believe physical stores will remain important to Habitat which is why we are evolving our store offer and rolling it out to four further shops.“
