Store Selfridges & Co.

Product range. Menswear, womenswear, and childrenswear; footwear and accessories, as a well as a wide range of beauty products, homeware, consumer electronics, food and wines and spirits. All the products are high end. Womenswear range alone counts over 13,000 items. The brand directory is as much impressive boasting over 700 labels.

Originality. The flagship Selfridges Oxford street store in London is one of the oldest and most celebrated department stores in the world, alongside Galeries Lafayette, Paris and the like. The store is also one of the largest in the UK, second only to Harrods. Selfridges and Co. has two branches in Manchester (two stores) and Birmingham. The Brummie one, housed in Bullring shopping centre, is also renowned for its elaborate architectural design. This award-winning curved landmark building, with sprayed concrete facade and a mere three windows looking on to the street, resembles a spacecraft and well worth seeing even if you're not a shopping centre enthusiast. To be sure, Selfridges also operate a full-fledged online store, as is expected from any top-rank department store nowadays.

Chic. Selfridges is a department store partial to avant-garde designer fashion. That is to say that the range of velvet bodycon dresses and other staples of feminine fashion is stripped to the bare minimum with Demeulemeester-esque and unisex fashion, as well as Burberry-like classic styles that proved capable of reinventing themselves over the time dominating the rails. For a store of such ginormous size this is something not common and was traditionally reserved to multibrand stores operating on a way smaller scale. The array of brands offered at Selfridges also feature a number of obscure brands with a local flavour. Selfridges buyers are well-versed in current trends by any standard, both in fashion and cultural ideas.

Pricing. Relatively affordable pieces by Sandro and Disel are offered just next to not that affordable clothing by Dries Van Noten and Helmut Lang, with the latter outnumbering the former.

Corporate history highlights. The Oxford street department store in London was opened by Harry Gordon Selfridge in 1909. The other three department stores of the Selfridges & Co. chain were launched in 1998, 2002, and 2003. In a sense, Harry Gordon Selfridge is Octave Mouret, a protagonist of Au Bonheur des Dames by Émile Zola, turned flesh. This American entrepreneur always thought big and revolutionized retail theatre making shopping centres work the way we know them.

Before he set off to the UK, Harry a junior clerk who worked his way up to become a junior partner at Marshall Field's, back then one of the largest department stores in Chicago, commenced his ambitious project that eventually turned retail system on its head: it was he who lowered then mid-chest counter height to make it customer-friendly, he was the first to use tantalising window displays, and he also pioneered personnel development programs. Harry Selfridge demanded his employees to demonstrate positive attitude towards customers no matter whether they actually buy something or not. He also put inspiration into his employees using table cards motivating the staff to be polite, lead by example, and know others' needs in advance. Team building strategies of this kind were a novelty back then. Selfridge had a keen eye for what was happening in the store and drilled the staff relentlessly to follow his corporate dicta. Harry Gordon Selfridge is also credited with coining and popularising the famous "the customer is always right" maxim.

When Selfridge opened his eponymous department store in the UK, he took a number of further steps to challenge the standards of the retail business. The Selfridge store was free of dividing walls and partitions, an impulse buy encouragement layout avant la lettre. A vast well-lit space with live music and pleasant smell appealed to the customer much more than those squalid cluttered stores Britons used to shop before. It was also Selfridges policy to turn down all potential female employees who lacked sex appeal. Selfridges was the only department store to house not only stores proper, but also a cloakroom, a beauty salon, a grooming room, restaurants, a dedicated place for smokers, a library, a play area for kids, and a silence room for the customers to take time to unwind. Harry Selfridge also shrewdly relocated the beauty department, the most lucrative of all, to the ground floor. That's how Selfridges became the harbinger of modern shopping centres and earned the reputation of one of the most famous department stores in the world.

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