Uniqlo relaunches Regent Street store

Japanese high street retailer, Uniqlo, is re-launching

its London Regent Street store as the chain continues to focus on global expansion.

Under the slogan, ‘Uniqlo makes Regent Street happy,’ the store now includes a number of new innovations, including offering customers heavily discounted items from a vending machine, where items will be dropped from the ceiling into the pod at various times during the day.

Coinciding with the launch of a New York Fifth avenue store, which will feature some of the same components, in a bid to maintain consistency, Takao Kuwahara, CEO of Uniqlo Europe and Group Officer said, “The latest retail design is in correlation with New York’s store, everything from design to fixtures has been upgraded. We need to communicate to our customers what Uniqlo is and we want to spread that message inside the store. Stairs and in-store digital offerings are the same as New York so that it doesn’t matter where the store is, the concept remains the same and you can feel that this is always Uniqlo.”

The company is on target to open 300 stores per year globally and Kuwahara points out that standing out in a crowded market is key to development. “We are trying to communicate with customers to differentiate ourselves from competitors such as Marks & Spencer, Next and European competitors also; there are so many stores on Regent Street and in the West End so we need to show what is different here.”