Hunting for George opens bricks-and-mortar ‘experience’ store

Internet Retailing

9th Oct 2017

Online furniture and homewares retailer, Hunting For George, will open its first ‘experience store’ next week at Highpoint Shopping Centre in Melbourne’s western suburbs.

This marks the e-commerce company’s first bricks-and-mortar move beyond the showroom co-located in its Richmond office.

The Highpoint store, designed by Melbourne-based Therefore Studio, aims to reflect both the modern aesthetic and community focus of Hunting for George.

The space features a series of colourful and textural backdrops, which allow the styling team to create varying scenes within the retail experience, such as a bedroom, lounge room or patio with a range of pot plants.

In-store services, such a design studio and innovative and creative workshops, from table setting, to wreath making, to book launches, provide opportunities for customers to learn and engage with the brand.

“We are excited to test our concept in a high-foot-traffic shopping destination as so far; we’ve crafted our audience solely through online channels. It’s a long time coming, as the original concept of Hunting for George was to be a retail store, but it wasn’t possible when we launched. So, we are excited to delve into bricks-and-mortar,” Lucy Glade-Wright, co-founder of Hunting for George, said.

Glade-Wright and fellow co-founder, and sister, Jo Harris, attribute the success of Hunting for George to the service and the value-add it brings to customers and see the Highpoint experience store as an opportunity to extend to them in-person.

“We love engaging with our customers. As an online retailer we don’t have that face-to-face contact so we thrive on the opportunity to cut through and talk to our audience and hear what they have to say in exciting new ways. These workshops are just another way to showcase what we’re about,” Harris said.

The store will run from October through January 2018.

Highpoint approached Hunting for George to create a bricks-and-mortar version within the centre. Centre manager, Ryan Ling said, “We are thrilled Hunting for George has chosen Highpoint as its first experience store, which will bring an exciting homewares offer to Melbourne’s West that cannot be found elsewhere.”