The sweet smell of successful management

What is the ideal store? How should the wares be arranged? What should be displayed in the windows and how should it smell? This was the topic of the first hour of the Eurobuild CEE ‘Retail Vision’ conference that was held on the morning of April 17th in Warsaw’s Intercontinental hotel. The conference opened with a presentation by Bartłomiej Juszczyk, the CEO of the Adweb group, who explained how modern technology could be integrated with the sales process, and how shop windows could continue to sell even when the stores themselves were closed. Later he was joined by Wojciech Grendziński, the vice-president and sales director of Internet Media Services, Joanna Turlejska, the owner of Strefa VM, and Agnieszka Mosurek-Zava, the president of Douglas Polska, for a discussion moderated by Aneta Cichla, a journalist at ‘Eurobuild CEE’. The first panel was immediately followed by a presentation by Forbis Group PM, with the company’s managing director Marcin Powierza, one of the group’s architects Anna Sulima-Gillow, and the firm’s operations director Mateusz Laskowski, revealing the latest trends in store design together with before-and-after pictures of the stores they had worked on. Two presentations followed. The first by Beata Kokeli, a senior director and the head of the retail department at CBRE, who talked about the kind of chains that were looking to enter the Polish market, after which Herculano Rodrigues, an associate partner of CACI, spoke of the research his company would carry out in order to facilitate the arrival of new brands into new markets. Later they were joined by Elżbieta Powierza, the president of the board of the Powierza Family Company, Zuzanna Łukaszewksa, the head of retail for Fashion House Group in Poland, Andrej Krawczyk, a managing partner of Academy of Systems Development, and Tomasz Wasiucionek, the commercial director for GPoland. Although many brands are poised to be launched in Poland, others – such as Gap – might be leaving. It is no longer enough for a brand just to be from the West to be successful, since Polish consumers have become more discriminating. Those that entered the market in the nineties, however, now have firm roots in Poland, which combined with the fact that Polish brands are becoming more competitive has made it harder to enter the market. As for the difficulties faced by Gap, this does not represent a failure of the Polish market when we consider that the brand is also struggling in its home market. After the coffee break, the subject of investment was raised, in which a clearer market failure was identified by the panellists. The top ten investors in Polish real estate are all foreign. The reasons for this were discussed by Kinga Barchoń, the director of the real estate team at PwC, Wojciech Pisz, the director of real estate investments for TFI PZU, Agnieszka Jachowicz, the property market funds managing director for BZ WBK, Sławomir Lisiecki, a partner of Galt Legal Adam Miłosz i Sławomir Lisiecki, and Robert Sztemberg, the head of corporate finance of JLL. Sławomir Lisiecki bemoaned the fact that there was not enough Polish money around to invest (60 pct of Poles have no savings) and that the country’s open pension funds might soon cease to exist. Agnieszka Jachowicz also pointed out that unlike the Germans Poles do not trust large financial institutions with their money, preferring to invest what savings they have in smaller schemes with maybe just one project. However, as Robert Sztemberg explained, the situation is changing rapidly, so who can say what the market will be like in another ten years? And then the topic moved onto high streets. Marek Noetzel, a partner and the head of retail of Cushman & Wakefield in Poland, moderated a panel with Joanna Kowalska-Szymczak, the investment director for Kulczyk Silverstein Properties, Kamila Jaroszyńska, the development and investment director of Sephora Polska, and Witold Dudek, an architect and partner of APA Wojciechowski Architekci. Joanna Kowalska-Szymczak enthused that high streets in Poland were clearly improving, but Kamila Jaroszyńska was less sanguine. Sephora has been unable to find a suitable high street location for its flagship store in Poland. It now has just four regular stores on Polish high streets, after having to close a number of them due to falling revenues. In the final discussion of the day, Piotr Karpiński, the director and head of retail property management for CBRE, debated with Grzegorz Czekaj, the director of Galeria Echo, Leszek Sikora, the managing director of ECE Projektmanagement, and Wojciech Rogala, the president of the board of Victoria Management & Development, on the problems of facility management. They were all in agreement that the skills required by a developer are very different from those of a facility manager. For a developer like ECE Projektmanagement to offer its facility management skills to the market there are a number of problems, not least the apparent conflict of interest when such a firm provides services to other developers. Even cleaning companies could start entering the FM market, and although they might not be able to offer a quality management service, in the opinion of the panel the competition will eventually lead to the overall improvement and professionalisation of the market. Having begun the day discussing the ideal smell for a store, the formal part of the day was brought to a close by the aroma of lunch and the chance to ask the panellists more probing questions over a glass of wine.