How Zizzi 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 Zizzi — a hallmark of high streets nationwide — and imagined a restaurant format that remains true to the brand’s heritage, but also meets modern customer needs and serves the local community.
Zizzi Meeting House & Kitchen
Zizzi prides itself on restaurant environments that encourage people to relax and dwell. It’s how they scored an impressive record on visitors at a time when casual dining brands are closing doors. And with the rise of shared working spaces and smaller households where shared space is scant, they ought to better leverage that investment.
Welcome to the Zizzi Meeting House & Kitchen: your place to host get togethers.
Through careful environment design, each Zizzi branch is designed for different groups who want to gather and spend time together — whether that’s teams having their weekly stand up, a networking event or a local community group get-together. Areas are bookable on an hourly basis, with a selection of Zizzi’s delicious Italian food available at a discount.
This democratises the high-end event space market — hotels and private members clubs — and is more accessible than startups, whose service is limited to capital cities (Airbnb, Breather).
It’d eliminate some inefficiency in Zizzi’s business, which is packed at lunch and dinner but lacks visitors throughout the day. And it’d become a vital service for the community, with businesses and residents having a new place to congregate.
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 organisation and beyond in the hope that CEO Steve Holmes hears about it. Of course we’d love to be part of making this happen — but more than that, we want to see it happen.
Read more:
- What is The Living High Street?
- A day on Living High Street for a working parent, a local business owner, a high street store manager and a local council rep
- How M&S, WHSmith, TSB, Thomas Cook, 3 and Yodel can empower their people to save the UK high street
- The principles behind Living High Street
- How to make Living High Street real?
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.
Jenny Burns is an Executive Partner at Fluxx Ltd. She has worked with big companies like Barclays, 02, British Gas and RSA. Find out more by emailing Jenny.burns@fluxx.uk.com.
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