How John Lewis’s flagship Oxford Street store will look in £6,500,000 transformation
One of John Lewis’s most popular stores is undergoing a £6.5 million transformation.
Following the pandemic, John Lewis considered turning entire floors of their Oxford Street chain into offices.
But just a few years later, the company are investing a whopping £6.5 million into the chain with executives increasingly confident about the future of their stores.
A revamp of the Oxford Street chain is focused on offering customers a revitalised shopping experience and is well underway.
The six-storey store has seen updates on every floor, including a new Waterstones bookshop which opened earlier this month.
The flagship too includes a fragrance hall, an updated jewellery space and a host of new brands have been added to its home department.
And within the Oxford Street chain’s various departments, customers can enjoy new spa treatment rooms, a piercing and jewellery welding studio and even a Jamie Oliver cooking school which will open in March of next year.
There will also be a willy-wonka style golden ticket where one lucky customer can win a free cooking lesson with Jamie Oliver himself.
Peter Ruis, the boss of the department store, said: ‘The buzz is back in John Lewis and we’re giving customers even more reasons to shop our brilliant stores.
‘We’re backing ourselves with significant investment to ensure customers get the exceptional quality, outstanding service, and competitive prices they love about our unique brand.’
The Oxford Street revamp is part of a wider £800m investment by John Lewis to update chains across the United Kingdom.
The company took a hiatus following the effects of the pandemic to focus on other ventures, such as renting flats and selling home insurance.
But now, those at John Lewis believe chains and shops are ‘here to stay.’
Mr Ruis said: ‘We all came out of Covid thinking we had trained customers to shop online, and it turned out we hadn’t.
‘There has been a philosophical reset across the whole industry as it realised customers have come rushing back to stores, with younger customers coming back the quickest.’
The department store managed to turnaround an annual profit earlier this year for the first time in a number of years but failed to pay its staff an annual bonus for the third time in four years.
But with rivals Marks & Spencer enjoying a purple patch, Mr Ruis joked that there could be a rivalry as bitter as that between Oasis and Blur in the 1990s in the coming years.
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