SNow+Rock Group culminates a year of growth with a new purley waY STore
14 September 2011
The Croydon tri-brand store will mark the 4th store opening in the last year, alongside 13 new concessions which the Snow+Rock Group have opened.
LGV’s portfolio company, the Snow+Rock Group, is due to open a new superstore on Purley Way in Croydon in November 2011. The superstore will house dedicated retail units for each of its three leading specialist sports brands – Snow+Rock, CycleSurgery and Runners Need.
The Croydon site will be the fourth new store to open since the management buy-out in September 2010. During the past year, a tri-brand superstore opened in Exeter in December 2010, followed by a combined CycleSurgery and Runners Need on Chiswell Street, near Moorgate in central London, in June 2011. The business also opened a dedicated Specialized Concept Store in Covent Garden in June 2011, in collaboration with the leading bike brand Specialized, which houses a full range of its latest bike models and accessories. In line with the Group’s multi-brand strategy, a further 13 new Runners Need stores have been opened within the existing Snow+Rock store estate.
These new store openings demonstrate the Group’s strategy of rolling-out new stores to carefully selected locations, and providing its customers with access to a combination of its three brands, whilst maintaining each brand as a dedicated, leading retail specialist. Once Croydon is opened, the Group will have 39 trading sites, with 22 Snow+Rock stores, 23 CycleSurgery stores, 23 Runners Need stores, as well as three dedicated brand concept stores.
The online channel continues to demonstrate very strong growth for each of the three brands, and the Group has invested significantly in this area in developing the websites and driving awareness of its leading online product offering. Following the acquisition of Runners Need in 2010, a new website was very successfully launched in June 2011 on the same platform as the rest of the Group. The business is continuing to invest in new multichannel services and functionality to offer its customers the same high levels of service that they have come to enjoy in its physical stores.
Croydon has been a destination retail location that the business has targeted to have a tri-brand store for some time, and is delighted to have secured a prime location on Purley Way. At 14,000 square feet, it will be the Group’s largest store to date, and designed to deliver a superb customer experience. The business has a pipeline of further potential new store sites which it is targeting for 2012 openings, with a particular focus on the cycling and running markets.
