Susan Freeman
Hi, I’m Susan Freeman. Welcome back to our PropertyShe podcast series brought to you by Mishcon de Reya in association with the London Real Estate Forum, where I get to interview some of the key influencers in the world of real estate and the built environment. Today, I am delighted to welcome retail guru, Bev Churchill. With nearly 30 years immersed in the worlds of retail and real estate, specialising in brand building and place making, Bev’s key involvement in the transformation of both Selfridges and the Covent Garden Estate, two of London’s best loved destinations lead to the founding in 2017 or Churchill and Partners. Unique in the market in its focus on the commercial elements the schemes ground floor since the business launched 5 years ago she’s worked with some of the best known real estate owners and developers in the world. Setting strategies to transform underperforming retail assets or meticulously planning new ones, Bev is able to approach projects with a dual creative and commercial mind set, respecting the business needs of the developer, understanding the shifting requirements of tenant brands and appreciating customer’s complex lifestyles and evolving desires through the modern consumer landscape. So now we are going to hear from Bev Churchill on her fascinating career journey to date and the secrets of successful retail place making. Bev, welcome and it’s so lovely to see you again because it has been a few years and I think for our listeners it would be really useful to start off with your career journey to date, you know, talk a little about, I mean you obviously didn’t go straight into retail consultancy, and just tell us a little bit about how you go there?
Beverley Churchill
Lovely to see you to and long time um, so how far do you want to go back?
Susan Freeman
Well.
Beverley Churchill
We have to start with the understanding that I am extremely old so there’s a lot packed in there. No I haven’t had a direct route into things um and never actually planned this although when I tell the story these days there’s a nice kind of narrative arc to it which is obviously entirely made up because hindsight is a wonderful thing. I started out um, I finished a psychology degree and was looking around for something to do and I had a girlfriend who worked in a design consultancy and she wanted desperately to work in fashion but was a nice girl and didn’t want to leave her team in the lurch so she put the two of us together and that was really my first job in a little partnership practice called Pemberton and Whitefoord – bless them – bless then for putting up with me for two years and I was kind of a Girl Friday so I spent a couple of years with then learning about graphics and design um and then I went to Klineside and became their client overnight so they were doing packaging design work for FMCG businesses so Safeway and Sainsbury’s and M&S and various other companies and I was asked to join the team at Safeway and I did that and I worked in the non-foods team, learning all about how to retail and how that worked and new product development and how to get things on to shelf quickly and efficiently and looking good and I really liked it and there was a really nice guy called Ian Welsh who headed up a team there and he was very inspiring as a leader and I thought, well this could be quite good but if I am going to do this I might as well be working for a company that’s kind of you know, going somewhere and so got myself a job at Tesco. Same sort of capacity, packaging design manager in a team of I don’t know, 12, 15 people and then after about 3 or 6 months they dragged everyone into a room and said, really sorry the whole team is being disbanded and you are all being made redundant. I was like, oh well there you go, that’s, that didn’t last very long and then they asked me to stay behind and they said, er well not you because we want you to run the team and I said, well run what, you’ve just sacked everyone. So they said, well just work something out. So then I set up an outsourcing model for the business er and I sat in the commercial team rather than the marketing team and then spent the next 5 years having great fun with my agencies. We did some really, really interesting branded work in the time of MeToo’s, I kind of challenged the whole business really about that and we created with Paul Forland um, a known brand identity that would go over 25,000 different products um and rolled that out and did various other things at the time and I found myself after 5 years when literally the brief landed on my desk again for I think it was, kitchen towels, I was like, I think I’ve done this before, I can’t go around that roundabout again. Came across a copy of Marketing Week, flicking through it, saw a half page ad and it had obviously been written in a hurry, it was a black ad and it just had – Head of Marketing Selfridges say no more and I was like, that sounds quite interesting so I applied and was given the job. So I walked from FMCG into luxury, not really understanding the luxury world at all and had a team of almost 50 people that were covering all different parts of the marketing mix really and I joined the business that was eye opening and rule breaking and it was led by the wonderful Viktoria Reditchay and he was just an incredibly inspiring leader for everyone in that business particularly for me. Having always been a bit of a provocateur, my husband calls me a habitual line stepper and Viktoria was the kind of living, breathing embodiment of that so he probably coined the phrase ‘disruptor’ but he really encouraged the business of his teams to excel but excel by challenging themselves, breaking rules, pushing norms and doing things very, very differently and I had an absolute ball doing that, an absolute ball and then we tried and failed to do an MBO um and the business was bought by the Western family. I was promoted to Marketing Director and stayed with them for another 18 months or so and then kind of you know, felt like the person in the team who had a different approach and ethos and philosophy which was routed in the past and they obviously had a commercial agenda that they needed to um, implement and so we kind of parted ways at that stage. And then I kind of you know, fast track over a couple of um, a couple of moments in my career; one of which I can’t talk about because of an NDA.
Susan Freeman
Bev, before you roll forwards.
Beverley Churchill
Yeah.
Susan Freeman
I do have a few questions about the Selfridge experience because you must have joined just as it was being completely you know, transformed and it, it was, it was a very exciting time because it went from being sort of quite a drab, boring department store to being this amazing place where all sorts of events went on, there were all sorts of themes so you were leading on that so it was, that was pretty ground breaking.
Beverley Churchill
Yeah it was, I mean if you think about it and you go back to Gordon Selfridges days we weren’t doing anything he hadn’t done a 100 years before but that had all been forgotten, it was very much the dusty old dinosaur at the end of Oxford Street um, Viktoria took the business by the scruff of the neck, he you know, it’s hard to believe at the time he joined the business there wasn’t a central buying function, there wasn’t a central atrium you know, it was carpeted and broken down into fiefdom’s run by middle aged men. All individually you know, buying their own collections and you know, running their own worlds so he’d already started that process of transformation and as I say, you know, created a team who he then totally empowered to go off and be bold and brave and make the business into something else. I think Viktoria’s insight before anybody else was that customers were motivated and inspired and interested in brands, not in products necessarily so we went from the jumper department, shoe department, suit department to Miu Miu and Prada and so on um and it was the original house of brand philosophy that then once everybody else on the high street and Oxford Street started talking about themselves as house of brands we were like, right okay we’ve got to kind of push this on a bit more. So we set ourselves a new challenge, we kind of created a new purpose and proposition and that really was er, called Exposure to the New - short and sweet but the challenge was every time somebody came into the shop or shops, they had to be presented with something new. Now that might have been kind of product, it might have been um, an experience, an event, a piece of merchandising but it was a constant reinvention which was what lead that strategy of you know, bringing retail theatre back to the fore and in both cases you know, his, his insight and his vision was ahead of its time. So yeah, it was a ball, I loved it, it was amazing.
Susan Freeman
What was the most disruptive thing you did?
Beverley Churchill
Well, we did these enormous annual events and we deliberately hosted and staged these annual events in a month where nothing happened. So normally in retail all the marketing is obviously there to kind of promote and support whichever period in the retail calendar you are in so sale or new season or you know, someone ate rolls. We were like no, we’re going to go May because nothing happens in May so we are going to spend a fortune and spend 12 months planning and prepping these events, flying all over the world bringing kind of these new ideas and thoughts and creatives and people to the store in May and the only one we did that wasn’t about a destination was about the body and er, that included for the first time putting tattoo artists into department stores but we found this performance artist called John Kamikaze er who we hung from meat hooks in his back and suspended over the central atrium at the launch party down into a bed of broken glass on the floor, which he proceeded to swim around in and then the next day we hung him in a window by meat hooks in his back um and had the window blacked out because Westminster were like, even by your standards guys that’s pushing it. So we had to have viewing holes so kids couldn’t see it and be disturbed. I’d say that’s probably the one that stands out as being one of the craziest things we did.
Susan Freeman
Sounds wonderful. I have to say I love department stores and every time I see another department store closing and you know, we’re told well people don’t want department stores anymore, I think about Selfridges and, and you now.
Beverley Churchill
It was and it wasn’t a department store you know, again Viktoria was, his, his thoughts and guidance were very much along the lines of, your competition is not Harrods and Harvey Nichols, your competition are parks, cultural destinations, museums, galleries, anywhere people want to spend their free time. We want them to come, we want them to kind of spend this time they have with us and of they buy a pair of socks on the way out, great. But it’s all about getting them to come and participate and see things and that will build a relationship and loyalty and from there you build sales.
Susan Freeman
Okay so you, you got to the part in the story where your time at Selfridges had run its course and I think you then, you did have a spell at um BHS.
Beverley Churchill
I did. As Marketing Director.
Susan Freeman
Okay, so that was I think you signed for 6 months stayed for 12 and, and that must also have been a sort of rather sort of different retail experience.
Beverley Churchill
It was a very different retail experience, really different and you know, the, the second 6 months really was because I’d created a strategy and built a team and you know, wanted to try to make a difference. It’s probably the only time in my career I didn’t listen to my own instincts screaming at me er, from day one, don’t do it and maybe succumbed to some vanity of thinking, maybe I could be the one who changes things, maybe I could be the one that makes a difference. No. No, no, no. Not possible.
Susan Freeman
Well I think sometimes you learn from the things that don’t go, go right so you know an interesting…
Beverley Churchill
Absolutely.
Susan Freeman
…interesting learning experience. You were then persuaded to go to a, to a property company.
Beverley Churchill
I know, I know, I know. Who’d have thought.
Susan Freeman
So that, was that 2007.
Beverley Churchill
Yeah the conversation started towards late 2006 and I got a call from a head hunter saying, are you interested in a job marketing Covent Garden to which my response was, oh my god no, that place is a dump, no it’s horrible and quite frankly I’ve got no interest in you know, having tenants and occupiers kind of moaning about how big their logo is on a piece of collateral, not interested. So this head hunter said, but you must go and meet, you must go and meet Ian Hawksworth who’s leading this conference. Alright, so I go along and dutifully er walk into er this room to have a conversation with Ian who obviously became my boss for the next 10/11 years and er he said very kindly and probably entirely made up, I’ve talked to four or five people and they all said you are the only person I should get to do this job. I said, well that’s very nice but I don’t want your job – so rude – er and he said, why what do you think the job is? So I told him and he was like, that’s not the job. The job is you know, you do what you want with Covent Garden and I was like, okay well that’s a bit more interesting and long story short, threw me in at the deep end with two very well, well, well experienced um, asset managers, Andy Hicks and Alex Cabalin and the three of us rattled round in a walk-up office on Maiden Lane and again it was very much kind of, over to you and in the same way that Viktoria had been incredibly enabling and inspiring, Ian was equally supportive and enabling. He was just like, I found myself sort of taking things to him and saying, what do you think about this and he was just like, do it, if it’s right do it, I trust you get on with it um which is very, very, very rare and very empowering um and we went on an amazing journey in Covent Garden, really transforming everything, all the customer experience, the mix, the environment, the marketing and at the time it really was um back in the day where people would run, avoid central Covent Garden and around um the market building you know, you’d probably maybe go to Paul Smith on Floral Street if you were a Londoner otherwise you just wouldn’t bother, it was sort of, the view was and I think it was true that it was, it had lost its way, it was unloved er, it was full of backpacking tourists and the offer had adapted itself to that audience so um, the bones were brilliant and er, beautiful and er, we kind of set about changing it and obviously you know, brought my playbook from Selfridges along with me and I think at one point Ian said in an interview, it’s like Selfridges without a roof and it was, it was exactly the way I saw it but it, it had a deeper history and more beautiful and interesting assets um and in the start of that knowing absolutely nothing about property, because the team was so small there was no silos so I was exposed to all of the different parts of the business as well as the kind of, the marketing and leasing side of things um, it was really kind of you know, being there to see how you take an asset and you repurpose the upper parts. You either kind of create offices and what does that do in terms of value er or residential and what does that process look like and equally doing things the other way round because the estate was so heavily listed you had to be really, really creative so you know, things like the Apple store um you know, that was a combination of offices and a nightclub and a restaurant in a bit of disused warehouse space, that was all brought together to create this, the space that suited their needs and yeah again it was um, it was a wonderful, wonderful time and such a privilege and joy to be able to shape a part of central London.
Susan Freeman
And I think people almost don’t remember Covent Garden as it was and it has been an amazing transformation and do you think the fact that it is you know, it’s got all the elements, it’s got the retails, it’s got offices, it’s got people living in the area you know, is that what helps to make it such a vibrant community?
Beverley Churchill
Yeah undoubtedly. Undoubtedly it is and I think that, that mixed use er nature kind of keeps places working and ticking year round um day and night um and it kind of feels like a living place, it doesn’t feel just like a transactional place.
Susan Freeman
And how do you measure success with your retail strategy you know, with somewhere like you know, Covent Garden, is it just increasing sort of the value of the assets, is it the footfall, is it what people are saying about it?
Beverley Churchill
You can set whichever KPIs you like I suppose but we were a total returns business at the time and Ian was very clear on the targets and how we could reach then and had a belief in that, that I think surprised everybody um about how far we could take it um, it was you know, it was an incredibly bold process to go through but it taught me that you have to believe in what you are doing, you have to believe in your own assets, you have to believe in the power of the place making that as a business you are delivering. Because you have to back it you have to invest in it, it doesn’t just happen kind of organically and sometimes it’s kind of that correlation between investment and return takes time to be delivered upon. So um, yeah it depends on how kind of forward thinking I think the property owner, developer, landlord choses to be.
Susan Freeman
And it must be, it must be quite difficult if you’re offered a higher rent for instance by a covenant that is you know, is a good covenant but it isn’t going to really add to the, to the place so there’s all that to balance which um must be difficult.
Beverley Churchill
It is for a lot of people because normally the, the role of grand guardian, place guardian and the commercial negotiation is usually kind of squashed into one role so you end up with leasing managers who are ultimately conflicted between doing the best commercially for a business and different business have different goals, some are about slow steady growth, some are about kind of you know, faster returns. It depends on what your, your immediate kind of priorities and needs are and then also is this right for the place, does this serve our customers, does it support our proposition of who we are and we would genuinely sit and debate the tension between those two things on every deal we did.
Susan Freeman
So what has gone wrong with retail place making because we keep hearing that you know, retail is, is dead, there are shopping centres that you know, one can’t do anything with. How have we got it so wrong?
Beverley Churchill
Well I do think there is probably a lack of investment, a lack of vision and customers have just I think got bored.
Susan Freeman
Yeah I think I’m a, I’m with you on that because it’s like the whole sort of clone high street concept you know, you, you could be in a high street and you’d know exactly which you know, which covenants you were going to have. Maybe people feel secure because they know the brand but it doesn’t make for innovation and interest and to bring people back.
Beverley Churchill
Yeah there’s, there’s very much a cookie cutter approach to creating places and the thing I’ve found is that often the cookie cutter is applied irrelevant of the place itself and what it’s demanding so you know, in our kind of new business we start every single conversation and every project with a couple of very simple questions which is, why do you exist and who for and if you can’t answer those two very simple questions you should really kind of you know, put down tools until you can answer that because if you plough on regardless your mix will be wrong and once you start having to unpick that it gets difficult, it gets expensive and also it’s frustrating for your, your customers you know, the people who may live or work or study in the immediate environment or live close by it or tourists to visits to London. That clarity is kind of the priority I would say for every owner of a retail destination or um a place that has retail as part of its mix. And it doesn’t always have to be, you know, it doesn’t always have to be sexy and exciting you know it’s, it is very much horses for courses and if part of your brief is we want to create a brilliant 15 minute town for the people who are going to buying apartments in this town and that’s fantastic but do it and do it properly so services and elevated kind of amenities and essentials, that can be as rewarding for people as you know, bells and whistles show off marketing. Just really think about your customer and deliver for your customer or customers.
Susan Freeman
So I think, you mentioned the new business and I think it’s about time we talked about the new business which actually is now 5 years old isn’t it. So with all the sort of experience you had, you decided to set up your own consultancy um so let’s talk about it and some of the projects and you obviously felt that there was a gap in the market to bring those sort of skills um, together and I know you are very busy so clearly you were right about that.
Beverley Churchill
I wasn’t right about everything. I sensed there was a gap in the market but honestly 5 years ago when I er left, Capco I didn’t really know where I would fit in to the process um having been a client I knew where I needed more and I needed kind of consultants and agents to deliver more so I had a feeling of where it would be. I knew I didn’t want to, to set up as a leasing agency, there’s brilliant leasing agencies out there, enormous businesses you know can’t compete with that and it took a little time but you know, looking back and kind of you know, cool towelling the 25 previous years it was like um it’s retail and its real estate oh yeah. There is, there’s the bit in the middle and it was really about strategy and it was about providing a service where I could use my experience and offer strategy and solutions to clients and disaggregate that from the delivery if they didn’t want it. Always happy to help with that if, if it’s appropriate but that was the key thought in the um, in the early days, the very early days and we have developed that over time and we hilariously had a strategy sessions which turned out to be two weeks before the pandemic hit and everything was locked down and at the time we had a couple of different directions we could have gone in. One was more about the kind of delivery of strategy and it means you are incredibly busy and you get some very interesting kind of um sales because you’re kind of pushing services through the business but margin wise you know, it’s kind of you, you’re almost busy though I wouldn’t quite go that far but you are very busy, very hands on delivery, takes a lot of resources and you know, it’s kind of you’re looking at the top line numbers and you’re thinking you know they’re inflated through other, you’re buying other services in for your clients. Or, do we focus much more on where we originally thought there was a gap which is in strategy um and then you know the pandemic came along and made the decision for us so you know, we had that awful week of calls from people saying, we love working with you this is great but we have to stop everything and I’d been through that before, it doesn’t make it easier to get those calls and to think, what the hell am I going to do but it wasn’t the first time I had been through difficult trading periods um and so the learning is hunker down and if you need to kind of chop of limbs to keep the body going, then that’s what you do, you kind of you know you sort of retrench, conserve capital and see what happens and I was incredibly lucky because a couple of weeks into the pandemic I received a call from the related Argent team having already been working with Argent on Kings Cross which was great fun, they asked if I wanted to help out on the retail strategy for Brent Cross Town which is their enormous 180 acre mixed use site up in North London and I had been working with those guys since, so what’s that about 3 years um, as well as on other projects um and it really helped reinforce what we can bring to our customers and our clients so we can help out on existing assets so for example you know, we’d been doing some work with Landsec reviewing their outlet portfolio and that is going back to you know, my roots of right here’s an existing place, how do we make this better and we break it back very loosely into those three categories of mixed place marketing and then also we have this other wonderful strand to the business now which is master planning and turns into planning making new developments and working alongside you know, brilliant architects and master planners and development teams which I just love, I love the process. I think it’s endlessly fascinating and satisfying and you know, related Argent are just a great team, they are a really impressive team full of very clever people but they’re very clever people who care and they are the architype of a developer who understands the value of the ground floor and getting that lifestyle and that place um and that brand right from the outset and it’s, it’s a joy working with them and helping them deliver that at Brent Cross and a little bit of Tottenham Hill as well.
Susan Freeman
Yes there’s so much, so much experience there so I have um, I have interviewed Peter Freeman about Kings Cross and Roger Madelin and we’re going back to the early days, the early days of Brindley Place when it was considered just unfundable to put sort of retail or you know F&B into the ground floor of an office building and you know, you forget how far we’ve actually come in creating mixed use. So tell me a little bit about Brent Cross Town. So I’ve actually visited the sites, I’ve seen the plans so I know it’s been, you know that site has been talked about for years and years and years. So it’s brilliant to see it actually you know coming along now but so you’ve got effectively a blank sheet so you can create the strategy. So is there anything new sort of any new thinking that sort of come out of you know, for instance the lockdown and the way we’ve sort of changed our work patterns?
Beverley Churchill
It definitely has um and I think in terms of Brent Cross we’ve taken on board some vital changes, what’s happened with behaviours since the lockdown and bake that in to the strategy but also you’ve got to kind of look at, look at each case on its own merits and in its context you know, we’re talking about a site which in the fullness of time will cover 180 acres, it will be 6,700 new home, it will be workspace for 25,000 people, it’s a new town and as a new town it’s sitting in a part of North London where’s there’s a half a million square foot of very, very mature retail over the road, kind of as the crow flies 200 metres over um the north circular and in a suburban area where there are at least six of seven very well established high street serving their local communities so you know, it would be crazy to start that process in right okay we want a high street that’s going to be full of comparison retail and fashion brands. It’s like, that’s not going to serve the people who are here so back to our kind of mantra of who is, who is our consumer you know, how do we make this a brilliant place for the people who are going to buy and rent flats and apartments in Brent Cross Town, how do we make this a wonderful place for people to work and attract the best talent um and then usually that’s never enough to sustain a credible amount of retail so what’s going to bring people in from further afield and for Brent Cross Town you know, it’s all about food er, we want to be famous for food and that’s everything from food production to kind of dining experiences at all levels and we want to create a mix which caters for the tastes of North London. There are obviously the experience that the team have had um in Kings Cross has shown them the power creating wonderful areas public realm and how we create kind of spill out alfresco environments into those and how we plan now for those to be able to be used as long as possible throughout the year so we are thinking about how we winterise these places and we can keep that energy and atmosphere of people being outside of buildings as long as we can throughout the year. Um, and that’s the real USP of Brent Cross Town you know, the, the high street will service the community who live there and work and the food will be the thing that people celebrate and it will be a very different food experience to the one that’s provided over the road in the shopping centre.
Susan Freeman
That’s really exciting. So will food be manufactured there, will there be markets, how do you see it happening?
Beverley Churchill
Well at the moment we’ve started with some meanwhile use and it’s um, it’s very small scale local food production so we had a, effectively an abandoned parade of shops. You may have seen it opposite the visitor pavilion and we have built in there production facilities for a coffee roaster, a baker um and a pizzeria and that is that mix of you know 75% production and that’s because you know we’re on the, we’re on the verge of the north circular so in terms of these operators building their direct consumer business and wholesale businesses, they can get the products out, they can kind of use those road networks and that last mile into centre of town or around the north circular to sell their goods um but also you know, as the footfall and the customer base in the area grows hopefully sell some goods out the door as well. But if we just created a row of you know, restaurants waiting for people to go in and sit down and eat it wouldn’t work, it’s too early so we want, we want to support that idea of supporting local business and food product which again out of the pandemic you know, has grown enormously and then almost put the building blocks in place to, to provide the amenity and the, the things that people want when they buy in the new environment you know, you want somewhere you can go and get your daily coffee and a fantastic challah loaf. In the case of Brent Cross.
Susan Freeman
From Tami at Karma. So I have actually met the pizzeria business, they had um, they actually had a little pop up for an event um near me so I’ve actually sampled the pizza and talked to them a little bit so you know, it’s really, really good. So where do you get your inspiration from because you are clearly such a sort of creative person just coming up with, with ideas I mean you’ve just, where does it all come from?
Beverley Churchill
I think it comes from, I am a bit of a ravenous reader, I think I’m eternally curious um I am quite inquisitive and a bit of a magpie, I’m also attracted to kind of interesting things um so there is that side of things. I also find myself responding to the people I work with. I can, I did work sat here at my desk through the pandemic alone but I love nothing more than kind of sharing ideas and bouncing ideas off, off other you know, off other people and I’m glad to say I do my best work for the best clients and that, their challenge and their ambition is inspiring as well. I’m not sure, I’m not sure how much of a dark art it is what I do but I think I just try and put myself in the position of the customer or the retailer and having, having been in both businesses, been a retailer and been a developer there is a sort of interpretation translation between the two and really everybody wants to do the same thing, create successful places with successful businesses that attract people to them.
Susan Freeman
You are obviously creative but there’s something in having seen if from both, actually understanding the um, the landlord property company side of it and also understanding the customer and the retailer and you, you’ve worked in New York as well haven’t you so it would actually be interesting to hear about that and also how it’s different, how retail is different, how New York is responding to the pandemic compared to, to London.
Beverley Churchill
Well I haven’t been to New York for about 3 or 4 years um until shortly before Christmas so we were asked to help with a project for Rockefeller Group about a year ago. Um, they had an asset, a retail asset at 1221 Avenue of the Americas that had been through a refurbishment so it had, as a space it’s underground and it connects through underground to the subway system and to Rock Centre and historically I think it was all very much kind of dark red marble of a certain era. And these buildings, there’s three of these buildings some very mad men, stunning office towers but the space underground I think had got a bit tired so they’d brought 39.15 to make over the common parts and give the whole space a facelift and that, that sort of development work, refurbishment work finished as the pandemic was starting so the client team was sat there with a need to market about, a big space, 60,000 square foot plus, that was largely invisible in a market where there was um, anchor stores on Fifth Avenue going empty. So we were, we were invited in to help them understand the potential of this space and how it might be used um so we did that exercise which was great fun and we, we basically came up, we did some research and we came up with three or four different categories of users and then we virtually merchandised the whole space and ran an appraisal and said, if you do this you can generate this level of turnover and therefore you can anticipate this level of rent and that was then all brought to life by a team called Squint Opera who do really beautiful kind of creative work and are great problem solvers um and then they called us up again recently and said, obviously the sleuthing process which is being led by CBRE in New York, it’s going to take some time, you do kind of meanwhile stuff don’t you. So they basically said come back we need to kind of animate this space and this is part of the space which is outside, it’s the biggest piece of privately owner public realm in New York and um, we got to, we got to come up with concepts to put something great in there which is going to be launching in hopefully end of March, early April and on that side I was able to work again with um, one of my old colleagues from Selfridges who used to run the windows at Selfridges who had gone off on his own journey and set up a little agency and so we are partnering together on this and er, that’s been, it’s great fun and again a brilliant client, pleasure to work with.
Susan Freeman
It sounds really interesting and was your feeling that New York, I mean you mentioned sort of clothed retail units in New York and that’s what you know, I read about, I’ve actually not been to New York for a few years but has retail in New York taken sort of more of a beating do you think than London?
Beverley Churchill
Well everybody said it had and everybody said it’s really difficult there are obviously lots of voids and people had painted a really sad picture of New York as a, as a city that was somehow kind of sliding off into kind of I don’t know what, something that’s kind of you know, could never be the same or as vibrant or as interesting again. I didn’t see that, I didn’t see a lot of that. The city was um humming, there were people everywhere, I mean it was the holiday season but there were a lot of people back in town um and the most noticeable thing, it stank of weed everywhere. So they’ve legalised weed and literally you can smell it everywhere you go. And then the funniest part about that was normally in New York as you know it’s always quite you know, uh, the people are quite abrasive, people couldn’t have been nicer so.
Susan Freeman
Okay so everybody’s happier.
Beverley Churchill
Something’s working anyway.
Susan Freeman
That’s, that’s interesting and just you know, hearing you, you talking about how you activate retail spaces and everything, I just keep thinking about the um, you know the shopping areas we have that are not in single ownership, that are fragmented you know, take Oxford Street for instance um I suppose there is just no easy way of getting round that in the same way as there is one estate owner can actually have a vision and strategy for an area.
Beverley Churchill
It’s hard. I completely agree, its um, you know the bids try to um help with that situation but the reality is not all occupiers are created equal um, some generate more income than others, some cost much more than others to bring in to an estate or a place and if you’ve got mixed ownership you end up with people saying, hang on why have I got the one that’s got kind of you know, a 5 year incentive package to open it sat in my property that’s on 15 quid square foot income and you’ve got the, the one that’s kind of generating like a turnover over there. It’s very, very hard. I think there has to be in those cases, I think there has to be some form of extension to the bid because what’s happened with the bids is they are generally about marketing, they are not about collating the assets and you know, taking a holistic approach at how you create a place that is balanced um and has the right elements within it you know, to create that, that gestalt um, upside of the whole. So I don’t think it’s fully resolved yet or fully cracked but it’s clearly a challenge for, for everyone and it even in the case of you know going back to Covent Garden and Capco, we started out with 400,000 square foot of assets and we carried a lot of people with us, I think there was about one and a half million square foot now but along the way you know, we added value to a lot of other people’s assets and that’s just par, par for the course.
Susan Freeman
Yes of course there are still only a couple of property owner bids which you know, then does become more interesting because somehow one’s got to find a way of pulling the sort of pluses and you know, sharing the risk.
Beverley Churchill
Absolutely.
Susan Freeman
So what, so what are your plans for, what’s your strategy for the next few years, what are you going to be looking for?
Beverley Churchill
Um, good clients, always good clients and interesting projects um, the business is now set up to allow us to have partners who could come in and participate in what we do and that’s been brilliant because it’s allowed us to extend our natural skills and experience you know, my partner at the moment, Ian Stazicker who is brilliant at understanding how to generate spending footfall so his background was tourism, came through value retail um and in a very sort of basic way I kind of create the place on the ground and then he can kind of bring, bring the consumers to it um so there’s that continual thread through. So more projects that I think are more end to end where we can do that, where we can start earlier and participate earlier in the strategy and in the master planning all the way through to delivery and then supporting places when they’re live assets.
Susan Freeman
And are you looking to expand internationally because I imagine the same sort of strategy and will apply equally.
Beverley Churchill
It is quite universal, you obviously need to adapt locally but it’s human needs isn’t and human instinct which is definitely universal. Um to a degree and interestingly we’ve got proposals at the moment in international areas for very big projects which is quite exciting. I think it’s that balance, it’s you know, the, the business is boutique I think is probably the best description for it. I’d like to grow it a little bit more. I don’t ever want to just be chasing fees, I’d rather be able to choose projects where we can really help and I think the joy of being 30 years in is that it is incredibly, incredibly satisfying walking into a room and understanding the client’s challenges or problems and knowing you can help them and you can’t do that if you grow too big so you know, dare I say, 10/12 of us maybe but I don’t think I’d want to be much more than that because I, I want to be involved in everything. I don’t want to pass work down to a team, I want to stay with our clients, most of whom and you know, many of whom at the moment are kind of, are colleagues I’ve come up with my career you know, so people I worked with at Selfridges are in various roles, people I worked with at Capco are um now in lots of different roles um from Mike Hood at Landsec who sends his regards by the way, through to others who are sorting of moving on you know, Sam Cotton at Battersea and it’s a network of, of friends not just clients and I kind of you know, I want to hang out with them.
Susan Freeman
Sounds like a great way to work. So Bev thank you, thank you very much and I um, I’ll be watching Brent Cross Town with great interest and your other projects so thank you, it’s been lovely talking to you.
Beverley Churchill
You too, thank you for having me.
Susan Freeman
Thank you, Bev Churchill it’s so reassuring to know that retail is far from dead but we need a better understanding of its potential and the ingredients for creating the right mix.
So, that’s it for now. I hope you enjoyed today’s conversation. Please join us for the next PropertyShe podcast interview coming very soon.
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