As part of its ongoing commitment to Festival Place, H&M has undertaken a complete make-over of the store it first opened in 2003 within the centre.
The new H&M store will debut a unique interior look and feel, covering in excess of 1,400 sq. metres and based over two floors, with a focus on creating a modern and relevant shopping experience.
Tom Houghton, Head of Expansion UK & IE, H&M Group said “Festival Place has always been a popular destination for H&M to meet our customer and as such it made sense to reinvest and build an even more meaningful connection with them. This new programme is a huge leap forward for H&M in the UK, enabling clearer storytelling and bringing a closer alignment to our Brand DNA. This will also provide a strong platform for all the omni features being developed to provide a more seamless shopping experience for the customer. We are so excited to relaunch the newly refitted store and can’t wait to see our customers reaction.”
Festival Place, which first opened in October 2002, was acquired by AEW in December 2015 with a vision to transform, modernise and create a vastly improved shopping offer and environment for customers. The H&M deal reflects the successful programme of lease renewals by AEW across the 200 retail, dining and leisure brands at the centre showing retailer confidence in the scheme, with further announcements expected shortly.
Russell Jewell, Head of Private Equity Funds at AEW, said: “The opening of a brand new look and feel H&M store at Festival Place is a great endorsement for the transformation that has taken place at the centre under AEW’s leadership. The fact that H&M and many other brands have renewed their leases – including during the pandemic and at a time of such significant change in the retail sector – is very encouraging and testifies to our proactive approach to asset management.”
Festival Place is the highest ranked shopping centre both in Hampshire and outside a major UK city. It is listed in the top 20 of GlobalData’s UK shopping centres report and Trevor Wood Associates positions it in its Premier League of shopping centres.
The centre is located in the heart of Basingstoke, the seventh most affluent town in the UK and the largest in Hampshire. With some 1.7 million residents within a 30-minute drive and 11,500 office workers less than 10-minutes’ walk away, the 1.1 million sq. ft retail and leisure destination features retail, dining and leisure brands such as Apple, Next, SuperDry, TKMaxx, Pandora, Jack Wills, JD Sports and FatFace. It features a spectrum of additional attractions to appeal to the local community including Basingstoke Sports Centre with swimming pool, gym and over 100 studio classes, a 10-screen Vue Cinema, a Flip Out trampoline park, Escape Hunt the world’s leading live escape room and indoor entertainment experience plus office space and a library with author talks and workshops.
Joint agents for Festival Place are Lunson Mitchenall and Cushman & Wakefield. CBRE is the managing agent for the centre.
