Neill Sherrell, srcg managing director, looks at Jamie Oliver’s new ‘kitchen emporium’
Shy and retiring are two words not usually associated with celebrity chef Jamie Oliver, so it should have come as no surprise I guess that his new retail concept ‘Recipease’ stands out on my local High Street like a ghastly pink blancmange incongruously slapped amongst the drab frontages of the other buildings. This is either a statement of great intent or, as I and many other locals hope, a design faux pas that will be remedied before long.
Before I go any further I need to explain what Recipease is. According to Jamie this space is a ‘beautiful food and kitchen emporium’ that is ‘able to sit within a neighbourhood’. What that means is that it combines a retail space with an area which allows you to prepare your own food under the guidance of a qualified chef. Stretching the ‘ease’ element of Recipease; we are presented with four concepts; Easy to make, Easy to learn, Easy to go and Jme. The latter being the chef’s own brand of kitchen paraphernalia.
Easy to make is the core concept and it couldn’t be easier to get involved. Employing real clicks and bricks cross channel integration all you do is book a session on the easy to use website and Recipease will shop, chop and prep all the ingredients for your chosen recipe, ready for you to come in and spend ten minutes bringing it all together.
As a piece of retail design, Recipease effortlessly presses all the right buttons and will doubtless win awards for its concept integration. From the street the tinted windows hint at the treasures that might lie within, whilst inside Recipease makes sublime use of natural commodities to present its natural products. The painstakingly distressed wooden fixturing, so smoothly engineered it makes James Bond seem like a chav in a hoodie, cleverly absorbs the soft as cashmere lighting, giving great depth to the fixture and providing the product with every chance to be the hero.
The spatial flow is easy to grasp with the idea being to engage the shopper through the retail offer at the front and then surprise and delight them by introducing the kitchen concept at the rear of the store. In developing this journey the layout succeeds and we transition from one area to the next seamlessly. Shut your eyes and imagine a rustic country kitchen cleaned up, specked up and gentrified for a Chelsea town house and you will be pretty much on the money for the design of the meal preparation area. Although how comfortable I would be to have the punters breathing down my neck and watching my every clumsy move if I had booked and paid for an ‘Easy to make’ session I’m not too sure. In sporting parlance I might be intimidated by the crowd being so close to the pitch.
A design success it may be, but ultimately you have to ask the commercial question ‘How is Recipease going to make money?’ Is it another example of format over function? A central concept stretched too far to create a business proposition. Maybe for once Jamie hasn’t thought big enough! Recipease only does half the job. Where is the café and the serve over deli? And why are there no lunchtime baguettes or coffee to go? Surely these are core items to generate regular footfall and to develop daily repeat business.
Pre-crunch I am not sure it would have worked, but post-crunch it lacks that one critical success element; value. However, in this day and age it’s certainly better than another charity shop!
