Retail & E-commerce | Shop-in-Shops: The Winning New Retail Concept

• All competitive and e-commerce-permeable categories, in which big format retailers underperform, are potential candidates for shop-in-shop tests. Consumer electronics, home appliances, furniture and editorial products are already the breeding ground for many tests and some deployments. But we believe that other categories, such as sporting goods, apparel, cosmetics and organic food could follow in the short to medium terms.


• Beyond the limited immediate financial impact, this concept still makes sense from an industrial perspective. Those who get involved now might be in the best position to survive in a struggling large-format retail segment. While there are not many "best-in-class" specialised retailers to partner with, large general retailers must also take into consideration the time required to ramp-up the concept (operational complexity, need to market the concept sufficiently to customers and clarify the situation on sharing customer data).


• In our Retail & E-commerce universe, the four French stocks seem the most active in shop-in-shop testing: Casino and Carrefour (both quite exposed to hypermarkets) as well as Fnac Darty and Maisons du Monde (both best-in-class players in their respective segments).