Hospitality Design - November 2014 - 79

perspectives

interview

peter harris
Photography courtesy of the Pedder Group

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Lessons in service from a fashion veteran

Peter Harris knows a thing or two about fashion.
He's president of Hong Kong-based Pedder
Group, a division of the Lane Crawford Joyce
Group-a footwear, bags, and accessories
specialist with more than 200,000 square feet
of retail across 50 stores and encompassing 300
international brands throughout Asia in Hong
Kong, Shanghai, Beijing, Chengdu, Shenyang,
Chongqing, Taipei, Singapore, and Jakarta.
Some stores are the company's-luxurious
designer retail concept On Pedder and its
contemporary counterpart Pedder Red, which
showcases many of its own brands-while the
firm also manages the shoes and accessories
business for Lane Crawford on and offline, as
well as for Shoespace in LAB Concept. And the
Pedder Group has partnered with some of the
industry's finest (read: Christian Louboutin,
Stuart Weitzman) and up-and-comers to launch
individual stores. Besides making the company
a global powerhouse, Harris is also focused on
creating dynamic and design-driven spaces,
enlisting the help of veteran designers, including
Yabu Pushelberg for the past decade or so on
Lane Crawford stores in Hong Kong, Beijing,

1
and Shanghai. Here, George Yabu and Glenn
Pushelberg pick Harris' brain, discovering what
the hospitality industry can learn from retail.

Having worked together, we know you
have an incredible sensitivity to service.
What does that mean to you?

The idea of service to me is encompassed in one
word, which is anticipation-immediately when
entering a store, restaurant, hotel, or checking in
at an airline desk, one can sense the readiness
and the potential of the service relationship
through that first approach. This is measured
through those immediate questions asked.
I want to be helped by people who are
genuinely happy in their roles, so I choose to stay
in hotels, travel on airlines, shop in stores where
this culture of joyfulness is apparent.
I am thrilled when I visit one of our stores,
shoeboxes scattered, and see customers enjoying
the service experience.

What could the hotel industry learn
from the retail industry's approach to
providing exceptional service?
Far from being separate industries, the retail
and hospitality sectors have started to merge

1. An innovative window
display at On Pedder's
New World Tower location
in Hong Kong.

as one. Retailers have learned and taken much
from the hotel industry, particularly in the area
of customer engagement. The concierge desk
and services offered, which first appeared in
our stores in the early 2000s, were very much
modeled on those used in luxury hotels but with
a much more contemporary approach.
The customer connection time in retail is
much shorter versus the hotel industry-exciting
store environments with investment in changing
visual merchandising allows the customer to be
part of a new journey each time they enter one of
our stores.
Like the retail experience, I want to stay in a
hotel that reinvents itself and responds to events
that are happening around it. The hotel should
facilitate a connection with something bigger and
lead me to connect with the city I am staying in.
Recently, staying in the new Waldorf
Astoria Beijing, I was intrigued by its assembled
collection of contemporary Chinese art, which

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