Habitat is to launch four further new Mini Habitat stores by mid-November 2017. New Mini Habitat stores within Sainsbury’s supermarkets will open in York (Monk’s Cross), Manchester (Cheadle), Newcastle (Heaton) and London (Wandsworth), taking the total to ten.

The 2,000 sq ft stores will follow the same footprint as the brand’s six current Mini store-in-store formats as Habitat looks to create a network of regional touchpoint stores to help support its multi-channel growth strategy. With over 60% of sales now being made online through the www.habitat.co.uk website, further investment in smaller footprint concession formats is aimed at expanding Habitat’s brand awareness with Sainsbury’s customers as well as helping to increase online shopper confidence by allowing customers to ‘touch and feel’ the quality of the products in convenient store locations. 

Each Mini Habitat store will showcase an edited range of over 600 products, all designed by the Habitat design team in London, with a range of price points across furniture, upholstery, lighting, homewares and textiles. Customers will be encouraged to touch and feel products on display as well as browse the habitat.co.uk website on integrated in-store digital screens and iPads that allow them to access the full product portfolio of over 4,500 products. Dedicated Habitat staff will also be in-store to explain product features and highlight additional product options online that can be ordered for home delivery or Click & Collect from over 2000 locations in the UK.

Managing Director of Habitat, Clare Askem said: “We’ve learnt lots of lessons from our six trial Mini stores in Sainsbury’s this year and these have been addressed in our upcoming store openings. We’ve refined our product range based on customer feedback, while our in-store visual merchandising and service proposition has been adapted to what customers want on a ‘weekly shop’ basis.”

“Our customers increasingly want choice, flexibility and speed and we are evolving the brand into a truly multi-channel business that allows customers to shop how and when they want – be that online, in-store or a combination of the two.”

Habitat’s digital sales are showing strong growth – over 60% of sales now come from habitat.co.uk and it is increasing its digital services, having recently launched Click & Collect, where customers can pick up over 3,000 small homeware products from over 2,000 Sainsbury’s locations at a time that suits them.                           

Askem continued: “We believe physical stores will remain important to Habitat which is why we are evolving our store offer and rolling it out to four further shops. “