The making of Virgin Megastore at Yas Mall

Virgin Megastore Middle East's new "urban lifestyle" flagship store in Abu Dhabi's Yas Mall offers the brand's fans more fashion, more technology and an in-house slide.

Nisreen Shocair, president of Virgin Megastore Middle East at Yas Mall in Abu Dhabi. Christopher Pike / The National

Nisreen Shocair is president of Virgin Megastore Middle East, a position she has held since 2006. She opened the brand’s first “urban concept” flagship store in Abu Dhabi’s Yas Mall last November.

Can you describe the changes that you have made at Virgin Megastore Middle East since you became president?

When I took over CDs and DVDs were close to 50 per cent of sales, our customers were in their upper 30s and above and 95 per cent were male. When you put that against what the Middle East population looks like, this was a brand that was beginning to look out of sync. It wasn’t until about 2009 that our customers really began to understand what we were doing – shifting away from CDs and DVDs and focusing a lot more on contemporary products, on technology. We had to change the way people think of retail: as an experience – not as a CD and DVD store. Now, 60 per cent of our customers are under 29; females are now over 30 per cent of customers and CDs and DVDs are now less than 15 per cent of sales. The brand is where it needs to be as far as being relevant for the market.

The Yas Island store is described as an “urban lifestyle” concept store. What does that mean?

If you look at 20-year-olds and under, they are changing their consumer habits. They are looking for things that are less shiny, less pretentious and we wanted to create an environment that is truly a third place, a space that really makes them feel like they are in their own element. The mandate when we went to the design company was: “I want to bring the outside in”. The materials we’ve used are very stripped down. On the product side, we wanted to expand, so we have a much larger fashion angle to the store. We are working on collaborations with local and regional artists on bags, T-shirts, caps so there will be interesting pop-up stores. We have been able to sign up exclusivities and have beautiful relationships with partners like Apple and Samsung. Normally partners say: “Let’s wait a year, let’s wait six months.” We have a long waiting list of partners.

Who is the new store appealing to?

A younger demographic and that’s probably because of the slide; that helps bring in younger kids and, by default, that brings in mums. We have a section in the store called Virgin House that is basically fun, colourful, inexpensive but high-quality home products. That segment has been doing very, very well. We thought Yas was going to be a weekend destination and now it’s proving to be a destination all week long. We are three times [above] our expectations in terms of sales.

What will be the big trends in 2015?

We are seeing a lot on the self-personalisation aspect: that could be as sophisticated as setting up your own smart home or as simple as 3D printing or kits for kids to customise their phone covers. Young consumers … are trying to stand out and moving away from traditional brands to more obscure brands that carry more style. They don’t want to look like everyone else – that’s where we fit into the equation.

Your website is limited. Do you plan to expand your e-commerce activities?

We are not happy with where the e-commerce site is now. We launched the site in 2007 and at the time it brought in no orders because the market wasn’t as developed as it needed to be. In the past year e-commerce has come mainstream. We decided to start with ticketing to ensure we have the right platform. That’s been very successful: 40 per cent of our ticketing business is through e-commerce. Our site itself should be launched in Q2, Q3 of 2015 and will be state of the art.

You have 21 Virgin Megastores in the Middle East and plan to open 10 more in the next two years. Do you consider that aggressive?

It’s not, for the simple reason I have been very careful about how we expand the brand and expand at the right time. Our market research shows there are locations that have been waiting for Virgin stores. Oman, for example. And we know that many of our customers are in Al Ain or Sharjah – two emirates we are not in yet. These shops are not all going to be 3,000 square metre locations. We want to maintain flagships as flagships and do concept stores as a destination. The next concept store will probably be in Qatar, then Dubai. We would be very happy, for now, if we could achieve that.

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