n the second floor: one was Italian stationery brand Moleskine, and its neighbour was Japanese travel bag brand Lojel. Is Marimekko Concept Store really a concept store? Across town from Siam Discovery, in Central Embassy – a luxury mall owned by Central Group – is the Marimekko Pop-Up Cafe, an elegant little restaurant in the middle of the Level 1 common area. It has Marimekko design motifs and a Scandinavian-style menu with the usual tweaks required to make it appealing to the local tastes. It has been open for more than two years and is a clearly distinct retail concept leveraging the Marimekko brand. Branded retailers opening restaurants is quite a trend and Marimekko was one of those on the cutting edge. But unlike the Marimekko Pop-Up Cafe, which is a distinct spinoff concept from the mothership, the Marimekko Concept Store at Siam Discovery stretches the definition of a concept store to its limits. Let’s keep the marketers honest, or at least as honest as possible.  We get help with the definition from Belgian multibrand retailer Hopono, which itself claims to be a concept store. A concept store, according to Hopono, combines three elements: It must have a theme, a strong focus on customer experience, and “a principle or aesthetic that gives the store a strong identity, making it unique and distinguishable from others”. Marimekko’s boutique at Siam Discovery’s claim to be a concept store is somewhat shaky, based on the third of these. The store has Marimekko’s customary colourful and upbeat prints, impressed on a curated range of clothing, accessories and ceramics. The aesthetic of the store is Scandinavian and is intended to express Nordic style faithfully. Thus, the store is well-lit, the colours subdued and the furniture made from light wood. However, whether or not Marimekko has succeeded in differentiating sufficiently on the basis of ‘Scandinavianness’ is arguable. If the visitor wasn’t actually told it was Nordic, then they would not perceive it as much different from any other Thai apparel boutique. Still, it’s a useful addition to the Siam Discovery tenant roster, as its owners strive to ensure that any brand opening there offers something that it doesn’t offer anywhere else. And Marimekko’s product is good enough to sell itself. Moleskine Milanese stationer Moleskine opened on the second floor of Siam Discovery in late August. Moleskine notebooks are famous for their quality. They are sewn rather than glued and the paper is acid-free to extend its lifespan. The store is suitably subdued and bookish in its colour tones. It also elegantly combines technology with the pen-and-paper tradition by providing an area for customers to choose decorations and custom-designed accessories that can be adorned quickly to the basic items with an in-store engraving machine and printer. This store is not touted as a concept store but as a flagship, despite its boutique size. So far, it is Moleskine’s only store in Thailand. Lojel Lojel opened adjacent to Moleskine on the same day. It is a high-end Japanese travel bag brand and, like Moleskine, it offers customisation services. Thai consumers love Japanese products, and this store adds another elegant piece of Japan lifestyle to its tenant roster. Both these retailers – Moleskine and Lojel – complement another Japanese retailer, Loft, which has a much larger footprint on the same floor of the mall. Loft, which has only two stores in Thailand. (The other is at Icon Siam, another Siam Piwat Mall, across the Chao Phraya River). Loft is a combination stationery, accessories and gift shop that offers beautifully designed products, many from Japan, in a manicured, engaging store ambience.  Bringing Moleskine and Lojel together with Loft in the same area of the mall gives browsers a smorgasbord of attractive products in the same lifestyle categories. Concept store vs new concept It is customary and understandable for mall and retail marketers to overstate the uniqueness or newness of a retail store by giving it a sobriquet that stretches the normal meaning of words. Some so-called ‘concept stores’ seem to take this road and if one wants to be a bit cynical, then one can say that every store is, in some sense, a concept store. Typically, a genuinely new retail concept created by an existing brand is a clearly differentiated spinoff that has either different product categories, or the same products but designed differently, and manufactured and priced to appeal to a different target group. Marimekko Cafe is one illustration and even Starbucks Reserve makes it into this category because it upscales an existing product to make a new statement. To underscore the point, consider: US-based Williams Sonoma’s various sub-brands, such as West Elm and Pottery Barn; Spanish Inditex’s portfolio with Zara, Pull & Bear, Massimo Dutti, Bershka and Oysho; or Swedish H&M’s COS, H&M Home and Weekday. These retailers have produced clearly distinguishable products, sold in different store milieus and appealing to distinctive if overlapping, customer segments.  There are also thousands of instances of brands selling the same or similar products in different formats (think of the edited, single-level off-price department stores spun off from the mainstream ones). Meet Zippo at Siam Center: a new concept flagship store Next door to Siam Discovery is Siam Center, and here another store opened not long ago on the first floor with a name that outdoes them all: this is the Zippo New Concept Flagship Store, a fabulous collection of Zippo lighters mostly ranging in price up to about 4000 Thai baht (A$180), with some collector’s items going for much higher. The lighters carry a fantastic array of designs and are neatly showcased according to price, which moves higher as one goes in a clockwise direction around the shop. It’s an extraordinary store and it scrapes in – just scrapes in – to both the new concept and flagship store categories. You can see where this might be going, though. Pretty soon, every new store will have to have attached to its name words like ‘Concept’ or ‘New Concept’, just as every new retailer or mall now ‘reinvents’ or ‘reimagines’ something. Memo to retail marketers: Stay away from ‘New Concept’ or any other phrase with ‘new’ in it, because in a few short months, it won’t be new anymore.