Canadian Retailer - Store 2013 - 42

STORE 2013 ERA AWARDS

STORE DESIGN LARGE-SIZE RETAILER

INTERACTIVE, INFORMATIVE AND EFFECTIVE—CHEK

Sporting goods retailer uses
digital technology to enhance
customer experience
WHEN the tide changes, it’s easy to get wet, especially in the retail business. Retailers that don’t
change with the customer end up underwater.
FGL Sports saw the shifting of the tides and
put a new store design into play. The Sport Chek
Living Lab is a new, 12,000 square-foot store in
Toronto. It brings together new technology, the
top sporting good brands, a product assortment
customized to the neighbourhood and new strategies for customer engagement under one roof.
“The challenge for retailers is in embracing
the change in shopping patterns, rather than
complaining that the e-commerce business is
chipping away at the bricks and mortar,” explains Chad McKinnon, senior vice-president
of operations at FGL Sports.

Interactive store changing the retail experience.

Up and running

42 |

The first in a fleet

FGL Sports moved “with great velocity” on creating its
award-winning store design, says McKinnon. The project took
less than six months from design to completion and brought
together the entire organization, including FGL Sports’ parent
company, Canadian Tire.
“We’ve never done anything that rapidly,” says McKinnon,
“and we had all these unknowns going on in the background. The
greatest fear was that when you flick the switch, it doesn’t work.”
And there was a lot to make work in such a short timeframe.
The finished store seethes with technological savvy, powerful
images, theatre sound and interactive displays on nearly every
surface. More than 140 digital screens stream customized content. A Reebok kiosk lets customers design their own shows.
Floor staff carry tablets to accelerate sales. A high tech treadmill analyzes a customer’s gait and recommends the right shoe.
And there’s more, including a digital community board, store
front displays that deliver live feeds of sporting events to passing customers, and even a valet service.
But it all came together on time for the grand opening.
“When we flicked the switch, it all came on,” says McKinnon.
He attributes the store’s successful launch to the collaborative,
organization-wide approach to the customer experience.
“The people piece was the ‘ah-ha’ moment of it all. When you put
brilliant people together who are active in sports and activity and
want to share their passion, you get a very unique environment.”

One way to measure the success of a store
design is to see how other retailers react. Since
the launch of the Living Lab, other retailers, including retailers from overseas, have travelled
to Toronto to take in the new Sport Chek store.
The feedback is encouraging, but as McKinnon explains, “we're not done yet.” The lab
store is part of the company’s strategy of hypergrowth, a strategy that McKinnon says will see
Sport Chek deploy somewhere between 10 and
15 mammoth flagship stores across Canada.
Currently, the company is building a 78,000
square-foot flagship in West Edmonton Mall.
The store will incorporate successful experiments completed at the Toronto lab store.
Back in Toronto, FLG Sports will continue to
experiment with ways to enrich and enhance
the customer experience.
“The lab store is lightweight in terms of size,
but it punches way above its weight with all its
digital and technology and in-store service,”
says McKinnon. “It’s the proving ground to
test technology, customer service programs
and services for this larger fleet that we want
to develop.”

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