Southampton Football Club unveiled a re-design of the St Mary’s Stadium Store in advance of the new football season. The store, designed and built by Green Room Design has the ability to flex during times of extreme traffic flow, and provides a more in-depth and explorative customer experience.

During home-game match days, the store’s sales peak is concentrated in the two hours before kick-off. The new design embraces this challenge and creates a fluid, easily navigated and open customer experience that draws people in and encourages them to explore the full merchandise offer, including new kit by sponsor Under Armour.

Leighton Mitchell, Head of Retail at Southampton Football Club commented; ‘We are delighted with the way in which Green Room embraced our specific retail challenges, operated within our restrictive time-frames and delivered such a fantastic evolution to our club’s Stadium Store, with great attention to detail and a high quality of service’.

A key feature is the entrance that has been designed to evoke the powerful emotion of walking into the stadium, with doors that open into a slatted framework, expanding and mirroring the tunnel approach into the stands. The stadium theme is leveraged throughout the store’s experience, and is even continued in the customer changing room, which takes direct inspiration from the Saints’ first team locker rooms.

Navigation throughout the store is aided by an open design that allows fans to see the entire store offering at a glance, including the triple height kit wall feature to the right of the entrance, the open frame accessories display, and the premium apparel section along the back wall. The payment system was restructured to maximise efficiency and improve capacity when the store experiences a large influx of customers.

Throughout the customer journey, the browsing experience is enhanced by tactically placed merchandise collections. The window displays have been adjusted to increase product capacity, and carry three distinct messages, backed by three mesh panels, again evoking the locker room aesthetic.

The mannequin plinths on either side of the store’s entrance enable key seasonal stories to be front-of-mind, and zoned areas feature hero products in bespoke display cases. The new store design and resulting customer flow enhances the capacity and functionality of Southampton Football Club’s Stadium Store.