bsp; Winning general manager Harry Boileau said creating a more engaging retail experience for bricks-and-mortar customers was a key focus.  The store itself is built and planned around a ‘culinary theatre’, where chefs and sommeliers can showcase their talents to customers, while also helping customers see how a certain appliance works in a real-world environment.  “We designed it as the absolute centre of the shop,” Boileau told Inside Retail.  “Customers can use the appliances and see our chefs using them, they can have a coffee, and sit down with our culinary team to talk to them about what’s going on.” The store also houses a ‘shower lab’, where customers can try out different shower heads to find one that fits their needs.  This interactive design is to be a pillar in the way Winning Group expands its business moving forward, as it moves beyond traditional retail.  The group recently changed its mission statement from being a ‘retail experience company’ to an ‘experience company’, taking into account its science and technology division, and its growing hospitality expansion. The business owns and operates a restaurant in Sydney known as Ora, helmed by executive chef Nobuyuki Ura. Customer knows best The concept of Winnings, while seemingly an act of group synergy, actually originated in the minds of Winning Group’s customers. For years, they would seek to purchase items from its stores that were used only as decoration, such as furniture and light fittings, which kicked off the idea of a store where the customers could reasonably purchase anything they saw.  And, as the group continued expanding into new avenues, it became clear that it would need to rethink the way it positioned its products in-store. The Winning Home business, for example, offers home theatre setup solutions to customers, but so far trades only online.  As part of the second phase of the Winnings opening, Boileau said, the showroom will house an in-store cinema setup that can be used to help customers see and understand the service that business offers.  The store isn’t solely designed to be filled with Winnings’ products though: it’s also been built from the ground up to cater to the business’ customer segments.  Winning Group’s chief strategy officer and neuroscientist Katharina Kuehn told Inside Retail that certain parts of the store were built with a certain customer segment in mind.  “It’s going to be fascinating to see how people interact with devices that have been designed particularly for them, and areas that they should resonate with,” Kuehn said.  “The brands, the materials, the colours, the wayfinding, even the lighting has been optimised for customers’ emotional preferences. We’re excited to see how they engage with it.” A Winning formula The store has been in the works since around October 2022, Boileau explained, and could potentially serve as a template for more experiential and cross-vertical stores.  “I don’t want to get too far ahead of myself, because I have to prove that the concept works first,” Boileau said.  “However, we’re at the first stages of a Rogerseller integration into our Queensland [Winning Appliances] store right now, so you can now shop the bathroom category in that store, and Canberra is definitely on the cards for the next floor plans.” From there, Boileau said, Victoria and Western Australia stores are distant plans that would require more thought and information to do properly, based on the successes and lessons of the Winnings showroom in Sydney.