STORE REFRESH

Formed on the 7th August 2014 by the merger of Dixons Retail and Carphone Warehouse Group, Dixons Carphone PLC is a multinational electrical and telecommunications retailer and services company. The company has a number of brands including Currys, Carphone Warehouse and PC World that are situated across the UK, Ireland and Europe. Dixons Carphone’s operations focus on 4 pillars: products, connections, content and services. It was the new range of Microsoft products that Dixons Carphone required Cestrian’s assistance with.

The original brief was to refresh 105 Currys and PC World stores with a range of tension fabric systems for the Microsoft brand. The TFS graphics were to be printed and then fitted into aluminium frame systems that Cestrian installed in 2013.

All of the display graphics were to be produced and installed within 3.5 weeks and before the 5th of December. December, as for all retailers, is the busiest few weeks of the year so any disruption in stores was to be avoided. Each of the 105 stores had been audited during a previous project and the dimensions of the aluminium frames had been recorded for future projects such as this. Depending on the size and style of the tension fabric system, there were six combinations of artwork of various sizes that had been specified. So it was crucial that each store received the correct artwork at the appropriate size according to the installation schedule. All stages of production, delivery and installation were to meet environmental and health and safety standards.

The completed displays, ranging between 7 and 12 metres in length, were printed within five days leaving the remaining two weeks for Cestrian’s UK-wide installation team to deliver and fit them. A full installation schedule based geographical regions was produced to keep costs to a minimum and to ensure that all installations were completed by the deadline date. All materials were delivered to a number of hubs around the country where teams of installers would collect and fulfil the daily schedule.

The fabric frames provided the following benefits: - Slick method of incorporating merchandise into print and increasing consumer interactivity. - Bespoke artwork solution that allowed for location variation and store-to-store consistency. - Quick and easy fabric graphics that can be removed and replaced within minutes – resulting in cost effective installation and easy maintenance. - Minimal disruption - so each store could operate as normal. - Modular and lightweight - for effective transportation and reduced distribution cost.