How WHSmith can empower their staff to help save the UK high street
The Living High Street is our plan to save the UK’s big retail brands with people-led change — transforming the role they play on the high street, and enabling their people to innovate and collaborate.
Part of that is reinventing a store format fit for the digital age. So we’ve taken WHSmith — a hallmark of high streets nationwide — and imagined a store format that remains true to the brand’s heritage, but also meets modern customer needs and serves the local community.
WHSmith Skills Zone
WHSmith’s travel business is booming, but it struggles to convert visitors to its 607 High Street stores. Distracted by ruthlessly stripping cost out of every operation, they’ve relinquished a specific role in shopper’s lives. They should return to the thing that everyone, young and old, remembers them for.
Welcome to the WHSmith Skills Zone: the place where anyone can learn a new skill, satisfy their curiosity and enrich their lives with learning.
WH Smith hosts clubs and classes centred around learning, tailored to different groups and different needs throughout the day.
It welcomes a social group for the elderly who learn how to use social media to communicate with friends and relatives in the mid morning. At lunchtime, it’s a lecture on local history. After school, it’s a quiet area for kids to read, study, or receive 1:1 tuition, and in the evenings it’s financial schooling for young adults leaving education and starting work for the first time.
We all remember WHSmith revision guides. But these days, Google has a monopoly on ‘how to…’ searches, and Youtube is full of tutorial content. Skills Zone simply extends WH Smith’s role in a world where information is freely available, but acquiring skills is premiumised.
It’d drive footfall to WHSmith. It’d drive demand for existing products (course materials, books, stationery, technology). And it could be tailored to meet local needs — whether it’s vocational skills for NEETs, or insta-marketing courses for mumpreneurs.
The Living High Street isn’t real… yet. It’s our plan that could save big retail brands from a slow and painful decline. It’s grounded in driving the metrics that retailers care about — footfall, basket size and first party data. And it’s all do-able today with off the shelf SaaS (software as a service). But what it does require is a transformation of how retailers think about themselves, how they organise themselves, and how they manage their people.
Please share The Living High Street within your organisations and beyond, so that the CEOs of high street retailers hear about it. Of course, we’d love to be part of making this happen — but more than that, we want to see it happen.
If you want to design a new future for your business and empower your teams to build the products to make it happen, then we can help. Get in touch at Jenny.burns@fluxx.uk.com.
Jenny Burns is an Executive Partner at Fluxx Ltd. She has worked with big companies like Barclays, 02, British Gas and RSA.
To find out more about our work at Fluxx check out our articles on Medium and sign up to our newsletter.
