In 2011 leading energy company Shell unveiled a vision to refresh its global retail concept. The challenge would be; how do Shell position a credible “food on the go” offer at the heart of it’s retail strategy, whilst still being relevant to their its valuable fuel customers?

Shell appointed Shopworks to lead this international initiative, and Space 11 became the main second tier agency to help manage and deliver this project.

After a broad benchmarking exercise, a trial site in the UK allowed us to test layout and design recommendations and build the retail strategy that Shell would adopt globally.

This was based around defining customer shopping missions and using these to develop category roles and planning principles that we would use to layout stores and design category merchandising solutions.

The results

Initial results in the UK showed a massive shift towards food sales, a sizeable increase in overall browsing, sales and margin. The initial pilot site Liphook North showed:

• 49.2% increase in Food sales.

• 19% increase in overall shop margin

Towards a new mobility future

Since then as Shell have rolled out the new store format globally, we have supported Shell locally by refining the format concept. So far we have provided research and design adaptation in over 20 markets around the world.

As Shell’s global format team have developed strategy and design standard initiatives we have also conducted research, strategy, design and documentation projects to continuously move Non Fuels Retail toward it’s current goal of contributing 50% share of margin for the business by 2025.