How to make The Living High Street real?
The Living High Street is our plan to save the UK’s big retail brands with people-led change — transforming the role they play on the high street, and enabling their people to innovate and collaborate.
We’ve outlined the vision, the formats, and the kind of experiences The Living High Street would enable. But what what will it take to get big brands collaborating to actually trial something like this?
Come on, get real Albion…
The level of coordination we’re asking for might seem impossible to entrenched big brand retailers who, for example, currently can’t keep bacon in stock in their cafe, despite selling it to shoppers a few meters away.
But that’s because of their top-down, siloed, planning-led approach to operating, which is inherently limited. There’s no limit to their people’s ingenuity and determination, if properly encouraged.
The truth is we don’t know yet how to scale this level trust in your employees’ expertise and local market knowledge. No-one knows. But we know how to figure it out…
An experiment in one town
Like a lean startup, we need to ‘think big, start small, scale fast’. The Living High Street is a hypothesis on the big thinking. What we need next is to start, small. One town, 5 brands, each offering one store as a test bed. 18 months of constant experimentation in the ‘hard’ (store formats, range, logistics) and the ‘soft’ (people, ways of working, incentives).
In our experience only CEOs can authorise this kind of eminently sensible and yet unbudgeted expenditure.
Our ask
Please share The Living High Street within your organisations and beyond. Share it, debate it, develop it. But, most of all, please build some momentum behind the important ideas it contains, so that the CEOs of high street retailers get to hear about it.
Of course we’d love to be part of making something like this happen — but more than that, we want to see it happen.
Read more:
- What is The Living High Street?
- A day on Living High Street for a working parent, a local business owner, a high street store manager and a local council rep
- How M&S, WHSmith, Zizzi, TSB, Thomas Cook, 3 and Yodel can empower their people to save the UK high street
- The principles behind Living High Street
Albion is a creative transformation partner. We’ll work alongside your teams, empowering them to work in new ways, design new services, and unlock new growth. If that interests you, please get in touch with our CEO: jenny@albion.co.
