Sean Collidge, chief executive of factory outlet developer Freeport Leisure, says retail knowledge is more valuable than property experience. By Mark Simmons
You know the car ad where the obsessed designer clunks the car door open and shut repeatedly, to check the sound is perfect? You can imagine Freeport Leisure’s chief executive Sean Collidge doing the same with his factory outlet tills. Because he seems to live, eat and breathe retail, and this deep understanding has helped him blaze a trail in the factory outlet market, doing for modern shopping trends what his father did for women’s hosiery. “My father was the chap who invented the machines that made nylon stockings,” he explains.
Certainly, he has been at the forefront of importing the factory outlet concept from the US and adjusting it to suit the UK market. The company that he founded is the darling of the City at present – Freeport continues to lead the factory outlet sector on the stock market. Six out of ten planned factory outlets are already open or in the pipeline and expansion into mainland Europe is on the cards.
But as a retailer turned property developer, Collidge feels that his former trade is poorly served by the real estate profession. “Most property people haven’t got a clue what retailing is about,” he claims. “If they don’t understand my business, if they’re not looking at tenant mix, footfall, and are not sensitive to what’s going on in the retail trade, then I really don’t even want to have a conversation with them.”
Such understanding, he insists, is crucial and he has some advice for surveyors who want to get ahead in retail agency and consultancy: “Why don’t they ask to work in their key tenants’ businesses for a week? I imagine that a lot of retailers would welcome it, as long as the individuals are from senior management, preferably board level, and are prepared to take their jackets off and work with the boys. They’re going to be kept away from sensitive information, but they can begin to understand how these businesses work, what the real pressures are in the retail business.”
He believes his own experience, working as a buyer in the UK, then the Far East, before returning home to run Millets and then Jumpers, gives him an invaluable advantage as a retail property developer. “Those of us from a retail background understand the problems on the other side of the table; we can relate to an incoming tenant.”
And he is quick to quash suggestions from the property world that retailers are not always in touch with their real estate needs. “Most retailers and retail manufacturers understand enough about property to know what they want. They’ve got access to a lot of information, so they’re never going to get into difficulties acquiring, managing or operating their properties. If you get someone who’s wavering it’s not because he doesn’t understand what he wants, it’s because he’s indecisive as an individual maybe,” he ventures.
Retail in his blood
Even as a teenager, retail was in Collidge’s blood. In Swinging Sixties London he entered the rag trade at the bottom and started climbing. The latent showman in him, who insists that a leisure element is a fundamental part of the Freeport concept, was evident even then. “I put the first DJ into a shop on Oxford Street,” he boasts. Not just any DJ, of course, but one of the Radio Caroline team, who span discs in the capital in between stints on board ship in the Thames estuary.
Thirty years later his ambitions are grander. He has put a fully functioning radio studio into the recently opened Regent Inns bar at Freeport’s Fleetwood outlet, from which the local station will broadcast live twice a week. Cinemas, children’s play areas and model villages form an integral part of the package that Collidge believes have made his outlets such a success.
Yet when it comes to his own leisure time he prefers to leave solid ground behind and take to the sea. But however fond of sailing he is, Collidge is not the kind of man who will disappear to the marinas of southern France on a whim. Behind his easy-going manner is a character that is in its element at work rather than at play. Success, he maintains, comes from hard graft. “You put in as many hours as is required to do the job. You don’t go off and play golf or go on holiday with the family just because it’s in the diary. You have your social life, but you have to fit it in around building the business.”
So although he may be found some weekends ferrying horses to and from the family home in the Lake District on his daughters’ behalf, he can also be spotted wandering around Freeport Villages with his family, shopping bags in tow. Collidge uneasily laughs off suggestions that his children are equipped with clipboards on their visits, but admits that this informal market research helps define how Freeport’s developments shape up.
Listening to his daughters is a smart move, as by his own admission, most of his shoppers are women. And while economic forecasters and retailers are predicting a downturn in consumer spending, Collidge is confident that his brand of shopping will remain attractive to these women.
Budget-conscious women shoppers, so his reasoning goes, will come to factory outlets to take advantage of the discounts rather than indulge in the up-to-date but more expensive pleasures of the high street. “Most household budgets are driven by women and they will view it that way round,” he concludes.
But retail spending is not the only issue that concerns Collidge at present. The Government’s recently published Transport White Paper came down firmly against the use of private cars. As these are the principal form of transport for visitors to factory outlets, gaining planning consents is likely to get a lot trickier.
Collidge is already on the case. Earlier this year Robert Jones, the former Minister of State for Planning, Construction and Energy Efficiency who was heavily involved in shaping PPGs 6 and 13, joined the board as a non-executive director. Two Freeport Villages in the pipeline – at Braintree in Essex and Wakefield in Yorkshire – are intended to have rail links.
And while Collidge admits that this happily coincides with current government policy on public transport, he adds: “It’s also very interesting from a commercial perspective. If I can send visitors from Liverpool Street to Braintree on a Freeport train, believe me, I’m going to do it.” Richard Branson: watch out.
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