How London’s Luxury Stores Convinced the Holiday Crowds to Shop in Person
Head to the basement of Flannels, the sort of impossibly hip London concept store that sells everything from Aesop lip balm to Zegna cashmere baseball caps, and you won’t find anything to buy.
Instead, when I visited the Oxford Street stalwart a few weeks ago, I found myself immersed in an installation, called On Being, by the artist Max Cooper. The walls of the cavernous space had been covered with LED screens; on them were projected hundreds of anonymous answers to a question—”What would you like to express that you feel you can’t in everyday life?”—Cooper had collected for the past two years. The responses revealed everything from deeply held self-confidence (“My power is rooted in weakness, not strength”), to optimism for global order (“Don’t give up on America yet”).
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It may seem strange to have a user-generated light show underneath a high-end clothing store, but this strategy is becoming increasingly common in the UK capital. It seems no matter where you go in London these days, there’s much more to do than shop. These immersive retail experiences are all over the English city—and they’re padding luxury stores’ bottom lines like never before. Despite global warnings of the sector’s downturn, analysts estimate London’s highest-end retailers will see £1.7 billion in spending this holiday season (about $2.1 billion), a 3.2 percent increase over 2023.
“It’s no longer really just about buying something, is it?” says Nathan Parsad-Wyatt, director of communications and campaigns at the New West End Company, a business improvement district that advocates for London’s ritziest shopping destinations. “I think what London is doing really well is blending the culture, the history, the art and food scenes, to really engage customers on a whole range of different levels.”
Ultimately, that means people who might otherwise order all of their gifts online have reasons to seek them out in person—even if moving through throngs of other shoppers in central London can feel like trying to survive a mosh pit.
But it’s worth it if the experience on the other side of the crowd is sufficiently compelling. Take the Diptyque store on Bond Street, a residential-style townhouse concept, and the brand’s second-largest outpost beyond its Paris flagship. During the holidays, it installed a “delicatessen” crafted by the artist Lucy Sparrow, who made various confections out of her signature felt. What’s more, you can buy Sparrow’s wool Champagne bottles, fruits, cheese boards, and even lobsters if you wish, until the space closes on January 7, 2025.
It’s the kind of attraction that people are traveling to see. “Most of our customers are people who don’t live in London,” a manager told me when I visited. “We get some locals, people with offices nearby. But the installation is what’s drawing people in.” What’s keeping them there is a range of other services and experiences. In the basement, a lush private room played host to a wreath-making class on the day of my visit, one of a variety of special offers the store provides.
There’s no cookie-cutter answer to how these stores can serve you, but the logic behind them is simple: the longer you stay in a shop, the more money you’re likely to spend. Oxford Street’s Dyson store doesn’t just offer curling irons and hair dryers: you can get a shampoo and an expert blowout here, too. Choosing Keeping, one of London’s best stationers, has a bespoke gift-wrapping service that once boxed up presents for the late Queen Elizabeth II.
But few retailers take the responsibility of delighting and surprising shoppers more seriously than Selfridges, the rare department store with a free-to-use indoor skate bowl. In 2019, it opened its own movie theater—better to give you something to do while your partner shops—and its enviable culinary offering currently has over 20 restaurants, ranging from a cocktail bar in partnership with Christian Louboutin to the San Carlo group’s delightful Italian fine-dining concept, Alto. If you’ve overindulged, you can work off the extra calories with a complimentary one-hour test drive of a Smarttech e-bike.
Asked what motivates so many retailers to go this extra kilometer, Parsad-Wyatt points to the expiration of tax-free shopping in 2022, which has prompted even some very wealthy buyers to do their holiday shopping in other European capitals. “We’re campaigning to get it reintroduced,” he says. But in the meantime, “that’s probably one of the reasons why they are upping their game so much in London, to get that competitive edge elsewhere.”
Beyond the hard financials that suggest success, there’s plenty of anecdotal evidence that it’s working. Back at Flannels, I saw an alpaca sweater from Belstaff that had been taunting me in various ads stateside. I felt so good about Cooper’s installation that I purchased it in London anyway.
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