In the world of retail, location is critical. Even a highly recognizable brand with a ravenous following, like American Girl, cannot underestimate the value of a well-chosen location. Yet, their initial foray into the Canadian market, via shop-in-shops in select Indigo stores, belies the importance of location.
American Girl – American success story
Wildly popular in the United States, American Girl has built a reputation for delivering a compelling retail experience to customers. Aimed at girls of all ages, their extensive range of customizable dolls available in a multitude of combinations of hair, eye and skin colours and shades, are available through their online store and through stand-alone flagships and mall stores in select cities across the United States. But they don’t stop at dolls. By offering every conceivable accessory, piece of apparel and related product, along with a Doll Hair Salon and Spa services, American Girl has managed to create a completely engaging experience for young girls. In flagship locations, the addition of party rooms available for special occasions and birthdays and a bistro where customers can dine with their dolls, American Girl has established itself as a true shopping destination.
Indigo’s strategy
For Indigo, the exclusive partnership with American Girl is one maneuver in a long-term strategy to reinvent themselves as more than a bookseller and position themselves as a “cultural department store”. By actively expanding their offering beyond books into higher margin toys, gifts, home accessories and décor items, Indigo is hoping to offset declining book sales and become the ultimate gift store.
Having just opened the fourth American Girl within little more than a year, at Toronto Eaton Centre, and with plans to open two more locations this year, Indigo is aggressively implementing the shop-in-shops in key locations across Canada. So far, Indigo has managed to leverage the brand recognition of American Girl, reportedly drawing over 4,000 girls on opening day for the first location at Yorkdale Shopping Centre.
The importance of location
While American Girl is a highly recognizable brand within certain circles and benefits from an avid following, it remains a new brand to the Canadian market. For an established but struggling retailer like Indigo, the payout of creating shop-in-shops comes from both leveraging the popularity of American Girl to increase dwell time for casual browsers and cleverly exposing the brand to the uninitiated. That’s where location really comes into play. A well-chosen location with good sight lines and adjacency to major circulation paths ensures visibility, piques curiosity and even encourages unlikely browsers.
However, in the case of the Toronto Eaton Centre location in particular, Indigo has consciously tucked the American Girl boutique into the farthest corner of the upper level, far from the active hub of the store. While destination shoppers will seek it out, casual browsers will miss it entirely. What about parents and children who aren’t already familiar with the brand? Or all of those aunts, uncles, grandparents and godparents looking for that perfect gift for a little girl in their lives? Never mind the millions of tourists from across Canada and the world that visit the Toronto Eaton Centre yearly.
Location can never be overlooked, even for a highly recognizable brand like American Girl. And given Indigo’s strategy, they are missing an opportunity to leverage the American Girl brand to increase traffic and grow that brand in the Canadian market – which in turn helps to position themselves as the go-to gift shop.
