Everybody, sleep now!
Askona company introduced a new format Hilding Anders chain store.
06/12/2016
The opening of the new Hilding Anders store took place in Saint Petersburg shopping and entertainment centre Ohta Mall. The novelty of the format is in the concept of visual merchandising. Unlike the network of traditional Hilding Andres brand-sections, which now counts more than two hundred, the shop in the “Ohta Mall” has all the characteristics of a specific boutique, which combines interior lighting, multi-room music system and multimedia walls.
“We tried to create a shop in a format of stylish and comfortable sleep shop which the customer wouldn’t want to leave,” — says the Director General of Askona Roman Ershov. “It was quite difficult for us to implement a new merchandising concept in traditional furniture centers: as a rule, they have strict standards for the display of goods. So, we developed a new format with the shopping malls in mind. There we will carry out further expansion of Hilding Anders.”
Today Hilding Anders is the third largest network of products for sleep in Russia. According to Roman Ershov, now the challenge for the management company is to bring it to the second place by turnover. Despite the fact that Hilding Anders tries to separate itself from the Askona network as much as possible, the company plans to follow retail development scenarios of Askona, and the opening of the sleep shops is one of them.”
“We know that the effectiveness of the existing platforms of Askona in the shopping centers is very high,” — explains Roman Ershov. “The traffic is denser in the shopping malls and conversion ratio there is better. The maximum payout in the furniture centers from the square meter is 20 thousand rubles, while in the mall it is twice as high. We count on comparable figures with Hilding Anders.”
By the end of 2016 the Kovrov company plans to open five renewed Hilding Anders stores in Moscow, including stores in shopping centers “Oceania”, “Horosho”, “Zolotoy Babylon”. Askona expects that Hilding Anders’ franchisees will take the regional development of this format upon themselves.
