Member Article

Couture Club Opens New Westfield Pop-Up Store

Fashion brand Couture Club has launched a new pop-up store at London’s Westfield Stratford City shopping centre - the Manchester based firm’s first outlet in the south of England.

Co-founders Ross Worswick and Scott Shashua founded Couture Club in 2015 with an initial investment of just £5,000.

They’ve already got two shops, in Manchester and Newcastle, as Worswick and Shashua remain committed to investing in the High Street.

And now Couture Club has made in-roads into East London - creating 23 new jobs in the process.

Shashua, 31, says there are further plans to open stores in Birmingham, Glasgow and either Leeds or Sheffield - as well as internationally.

Explaining the investment in physical stores, he said: “We learn an awful lot from physically seeing who shops our brand, right in front of us, because we can target that person and create products specifically for them.

“Instagram will tell you the gender, location and age ranges of the customers shopping with you - but we want that picture of who it is, from each area.

“And we take inspiration from them, because we’ll see our customers wearing our clothes different ways as well, and it influences our design process.”

The Westfield store has opened as a two-year pop-up, with an option to extend the deal afterwards.

Last month the firm announced its exclusive six-month partnership with popular Love Islander Michael Griffiths.

The Couture Club’s Manchester store, in the Trafford Centre, initially opened as a six-month pop-up in 2017 but traded so well it’s now in its third year of business.

Shashua, who is a trained lawyer and registered football agent, added: “Before we opened our first store in Manchester we were choosing between doing that, or running a national billboard campaign, which was going to cost almost double the amount of a shop fit-out.

“But the way we see things is that opening a store is cheaper and just as beneficial as running an advertising campaign - but brings the added bonus of creating jobs at a time when the High Street really needs that investment from companies such as ours.

“It allows our customers to get a lot closer to the brand. We would rather open up stores and let them see our real vision, to raise awareness of the brand and drive the traffic back online.”

The Newcastle store, in the city’s Metrocentre, opened last year as a pop-up shop.

In 2018 the partners won the Young Entrepreneur of the Year award at the 2018 Digital Entrepreneur Awards.

The business’s staff are split across its stores, its head office in Ardwick, Manchester, and in the dedicated warehouse in Worsley, Greater Manchester.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Marco/Richards PR .