Darren Jamieson: So, on today’s episode of The Engaging Marketeer, I am joined by Kenny Murray, the general manager of probably one of the largest attractions in the Northwest, bringing people up here to Cheshire Oaks. So, Kenny, can you tell us, how many people do you get through Cheshire Oaks on a weekly or monthly basis?
Kenny Murray: Yes. If you look at Cheshire Oaks, I mean, I think we’ll probably have about 7.8 million people go through the center this year.
Darren Jamieson: Wow.
Kenny Murray: Cheshire Oaks was built and developed back in 1995—opened in March 1995. So we’ll celebrate our 30th anniversary, our 30th birthday, next year. When we first opened, we were the first designer outlet in Europe. And although designer outlets have moved on and we’re no longer the only one in Europe, we are still the largest in the UK. So yeah, not only dominant in the Northwest, but also the largest designer outlet in the UK.
Darren Jamieson: I think I mentioned to you over email as well, I’m from South Wales—not that you can tell from my accent—and there are two McArthurGlen outlets. Well, actually, there’s one now in South Wales. There used to be one in Ebbw Vale called Festival Park.
Kenny Murray: Oh, yeah. That wasn’t one of ours.
Darren Jamieson: No, that’s not one of yours.
Kenny Murray: No, that’s not one of ours. So, we’ve got seven outlets in the UK. We’ve got York, Cheshire Oaks, Bridgend in South Wales, Swindon, East Midlands, Ashford, and then we opened West Midlands, which is near Cannock. We opened that in—it was due to open just around the time when we were in lockdown with COVID. So we opened it in 2021, just as we came out of lockdown three.
Darren Jamieson: Right. Well, yeah, so Festival Park wasn’t one of yours, but the one in Bridgend—which I’ve also been to—was one of yours. What I was going to ask is, Festival Park didn’t work. It was opened with a big fanfare, it had a train going around it, it was all really lovely. Nowhere near the size of Cheshire Oaks, obviously, but it’s now a bit of a ghost town. What makes something like that fail, whereas Cheshire Oaks can be so successful?
Kenny Murray: Yeah, I mean, the reason why Cheshire Oaks—and the reason why McArthurGlen is so successful—is fundamentally the way we approach the business. If you look at it from a guest perspective, we see it as being much more than just an outlet center. Fundamentally, we’re in the retail business—you know, that’s what we do. We’re also in the hospitality business, because we’ve added food and beverage significantly over the last few years.
Because we know that if you want to come and shop with us, you know, potentially, you’re going to want to eat or have a coffee or have a snack at some point with us. And then we’re also in the entertainment business. I mean, we make sure that when you come, we’ve got something to ideally entertain you. So if you look at Cheshire Oaks over summer, we had what we call Summer Social. So, you know, we’ve got street food, we’ve got bars, we had a carousel, we had crazy golf, we had a big wheel, you know, we had all of those kinds of things going on.
So we bring in things periodically when we know that we’re going into peak times. But likewise, for example, you’ll know that we’ve got a great big play area. I mean, we spent a substantial amount of money on that play area when we developed it and opened it in 2022. Because what we want is, if you make the decision to come to us at the weekend, we also want the kids to want to come to us at the weekend.
We know that one barrier to shopping is when you bring the kids with you, it can be a bit boring for them. So what we want to do is make it a little bit fun for the kids as well—that we’ve got a great play area that they can use. So, yeah, we focus more on the outlet proposition: bringing great products and great brands to consumers at a discount. So, a minimum discount of 30%, and at peak times, we can be up to 70–80% off, depending on when we’re in sale and things like that.
Yes, that is very, very important. But also, the experience and the environment—all of those kinds of things—are really important to the guest. And we genuinely spend a lot of time focusing on them.
Darren Jamieson: I think accessibility is probably a factor as well, because you’ve got a fantastic location right next to the M53, just off the M56. Whereas that one at Ebbw Vale, I don’t know if you ever saw it, you had to go through a real narrow sort of cliff access to get to it. It was quite hairy if you were a nervous driver. So it was a bit of a trek to actually get up to it.
Kenny Murray: Sure. If you look at all of our seven UK centers, I mean, they’re all well-connected. And you’re right. I mean, if you look at Cheshire Oaks, you know, we are well-connected on the M53. The M53 obviously connects to the M56, which connects to the M6. So, I mean, you know, we’re connected well between Manchester and Liverpool, which are two of our key catchments.
North Wales, but also as well because we are dominant in the Northwest, we also pull a lot from the North. So we pull from places like Lancashire, the Lake District—we even pull from places like Scotland where people come down. Because outlet shopping, you know, people don’t shop outlets like they shop high streets.
And I think that’s sometimes where people get confused. Sometimes people say, “Well, you know, do people shop you as often as they shop a city center?” No, you don’t. We’re very much a day out. You might only come and visit us maybe once, twice, three times in the year, but you’ll come and you’ll spend a day out. You might spend two, three, four hours with us.
And that’s why getting the proposition right in terms of the offer, in terms of the entertainment, but also getting the food right—all of that stuff is super important.
Darren Jamieson: You mentioned the high street as well and the fact that Cheshire Oaks is a different shopping experience to the high street. There’s a lot of people around Ellesmere Port that possibly criticize Cheshire Oaks or blame it for what can be seen as a bit of a death within Ellesmere Port town center, and particularly the Port Arcades, where you get boarded-up shop after boarded-up shop and it’s all closing down. What’s your thoughts on that? Because it’s not exclusive to Ellesmere Port, is it? Whenever you’ve got high streets that used to be successful, they are dying as a breed. What’s your thoughts on that?
Kenny Murray: Yeah, I think what’s interesting is, going back to the outlet model, I mean, the outlet model is fundamentally different to the high street, and it’s also—and I’m sure we’ll come onto it in a minute—different to online.
The outlet model was all about how you supported brands to clear product that was last season’s product, over-buys. A lot of brands obviously sell to large department stores, larger brands. If they don’t then want that product, then where does that product go? And that was the whole purpose of it.
It was also bringing what would potentially be brands to new consumers. And I always talk about that. I always use, for example, a lady who would like to buy a Mulberry handbag, could afford to buy a Mulberry handbag, but wouldn’t buy it at full price because she’s maybe got, you know, a mortgage, she’s got lots of different bills going out, she’s thinking about the kids going to university—she’s doing all of those kinds of things.
But absolutely, she would happily come to an outlet and buy a Mulberry handbag with a 30% discount and feel that she was getting great value for money. She wants as good a service, she wants as good an experience as what you would get in the high street for outlet, but she wants that value, she wants that discounted price.
And then, as I always talk about it—and we all like to do this—she likes to then go out with her friends on a Friday or Saturday and highlight the fact that she got a real bargain. So that really is the outlet concept. And that’s the reason why—to go back to what I said earlier on—we only see people one, two, three times a year.
People don’t make a decision to say, “Well, I’m going to go to an outlet center rather than go to the high street.” Because if you think about your high street, you’ve got your banks, you’ve got your post offices, you’ve got your general services that we don’t have—and we never plan to have those propositions.
So that’s why we are quite firmly moved away from that high street. And it’s a bit like online. People always say to me, “Well, surely online must be impacting on you.” But again, online is about convenience and it’s about speed.
It’s about, you know, “I’m meeting with you now, but actually I’m going to an event tomorrow, and I need to get my shirt for it. I haven’t got time to go shopping tonight, so on my way here today, I went online and ordered myself a shirt, and it gets delivered to the office tomorrow, ready for my event.”
You know, that’s what online is about. Whereas what we do—and we touched on it at the beginning of this conversation—it’s much more about a day out. It’s about, “It’s Saturday, the last couple of weeks I’ve been out and about and done my bits and pieces that I wanted to do. I’ve done my shopping, I’ve done the things I needed to do. Today, I want to have a day out, I want to have a much more relaxed wander around, and ideally, I want to get some bargains, and I want to feel that I’ve come back and I’ve really got value for money.”
And that’s where we are very much. And I think the one thing as well that people forget about is, certainly, if I take Ellesmere Port as an example, when we opened back in 1995, we probably employed about 326 people—round about that.
We now employ around about three and a half thousand people. And at peak times—so as we go into what we call the golden quarter, October, November, December, as we ramp up to Christmas—we will employ up to nearly 4,000 people, probably about 3,800 people with temporary roles.
So we’ve been huge for the local area and the local economy because of those three and a half thousand people. We know that three-quarters of them live within Cheshire West and Chester. If you then take that number and go into it even further, about 85–90% of those people live within Ellesmere Port.
So what we have done is generate some fantastic employment for the local area.
Darren Jamieson: I was talking with the guys upstairs actually, because a couple of them are local to Ellesmere Port, and they’ve lived there all their lives. I was asking them, “What would they like to see from Cheshire Oaks? What improvements would they like to see made?”
And one idea that came up—and I thought, “Bloody hell, that’s brilliant”—but you’ve probably thought of this before, you’ve probably explored it: If you’re in Liverpool or in Manchester and you’re not driving, coming to Cheshire Oaks involves—unless you want to get the bus, obviously—getting the train all the way through to Ellesmere Port train station and then walking.
What used to be quite a long way—you’ve got that sneaky little bridge now that goes over in the middle—it’s still about 20–25 minutes to walk. Is there any capacity or possibility for Ellesmere Port to have its own train destination?
Kenny Murray: Not so much its own train station. So I think there are examples across the UK and in Europe where retail destinations have been able to connect into public transport networks. And it’s something we would love to do in terms of convenience for consumers.
But also when you look at things like sustainability and the environment, and thinking about us being good citizens within the area that we operate in, we do consistently look at how we can reduce our environmental impact. And there’s no doubt about it, one of the biggest barriers to overcome is convenience.
It’s much more convenient for consumers to jump in the car, drive to a destination, jump out, do their shopping, put their stuff in the boot, and off they go again. And I think, now that we’re focusing a little bit more on sustainability—and everybody is—we’re looking more with the wider community, the council, and the public transport networks at how we connect onto them.
So how do we give people more of a layered option? How do we give you an option where you can drive, or you can get a bus, or you can get a train? What does that then look like in terms of how you connect them? And how do you make them viable? Because at the end of the day, you can run a bus from the train station, but if we’ve only got one person getting on it every couple of days, it doesn’t become viable in terms of the way that you operate it.
One of the other things we’ve done within the last few years is things like “hands-free shopping.” Now, hands-free shopping originally came out of giving you the opportunity to come and shop the 160 brands at Cheshire Oaks, and we would collect your shopping for you.
So you would shop, you would drop your shopping where it was, we would collect it for you, and we would either take it back to your car for you so that you’ve got it there when you get to the end of your visit, or we can deliver it directly to your door so you can get it there the following day.
And that’s when, from a public transport perspective, it becomes more interesting. Because the one thing that would probably put you off not bringing your car would be that convenience of, “Well, okay, if I’ve got to get a train or I’ve got to get a bus, I’ve then got to carry my shopping.” When the shopping bags are starting to cut through your hands, it’s not a particularly great experience.
Whereas if we can turn and say to you, “Look, actually, why don’t you potentially use public transport? That allows you to come and have a more enjoyable day, have some lunch, if you want to have a glass of wine or a beer, you can do that without having to worry about driving. And then we can get your product delivered to you.”
So these are the kinds of things that we’re looking at, and we’re continually exploring all the time in terms of how we give people more options to come to Cheshire Oaks.
Darren Jamieson: I’ve never heard of that before. It’s the kind of thing you always see celebrities doing on TV—just walking around, saying, “Yes, I’ll have one of those,” but they never pick it up; someone else deals with that. Is it literally that sort of thing? They don’t even take the stuff out of the shop—you go in and pick it up?
Kenny Murray: Yeah. So we basically currently have something called Premium Parking, and this is where we predominantly use it from. Premium Parking is a service where all of our parking at Cheshire Oaks is free of charge, but we have a limited amount of spaces—about 50 or 60—that you can pre-book.
You pay a price for that, and the whole purpose of it is that if you want to come to us on a busy Saturday, you can, on a Friday, go in and book a parking space. The advantage then is, you can come any time on that Saturday. We trade between 9 a.m. and 9 p.m., so any time on that Saturday, that space will be there for you.
So you don’t have to come and go searching for a parking space—it’s there for you. And then what we offer those guests is the ability to use Premium Parking. And you’re right, basically, you go into a store, you buy your product, and at the point of purchase, you then say to them, “I want to drop this bag and have it collected by Premium Parking.”
They then will, along with you, organize everything that needs to get done in the store. That bag gets left, one of our Guest Experience team then gets pinged off a system—we work off a system—and they get pinged a message to say you’ve left a bag in, let’s say, Nike.
We will then go and collect that bag and we will take it to a point where you want to collect it from—whether that’s collecting it from Premium Parking, collecting it from Guest Services, or some of our guests, if you’ve traveled—as people do—from London and around the UK, may say, “Well, actually, I don’t want to take those on the train. Can I get them delivered directly to my home?”
And we can then organize that and get it delivered the following day. So, again, it’s one of those additional services. It’s not used by everybody, but it’s an additional service meant to take the stress out of shopping and give you an element of convenience.
Darren Jamieson: Wow, that sounds awesome. I live quite local, so I’m not sure it would work for me, but I do love the idea—I do love the idea. As you brought up the parking and all the parking spaces that you’ve got and the sustainability aspect—obviously, we as a nation and as a planet, we are working towards electric cars. I think we’re nowhere near where we’re supposed to be, and the government’s target is absolutely ridiculous. But at some point in the future, all of those spaces in those car parks you’ve got will be electric. What plans do you have to put chargers into every single space within Cheshire Oaks?
Kenny Murray: It’s a challenge, isn’t it? I mean, I think we’ve all got an ambition, you know, to make sure that our impact on the environment is lessened. And I think we’ve all got an ambition that says, “How do we hit these kinds of targets that the government and the wider bodies set?”
We have already installed electric charging, but you’re right. If we get to the point where, as the government suggests, diesel and petrol cars are no longer being produced and electric cars are the standard, then we’ve got much more to do in that space.
We work very much with the local council, national highways, and other bodies to try and understand what that looks like. Because one of the challenges is, it’s not just about putting those chargers in; it’s about whether there’s enough power on the network to put those chargers in.
So it’s not just as simple as saying, “Let’s put in additional car park charging points,” and it’s done. We’ve really got to work on these kinds of things to try and look at how we can improve it.
We’ve already got plans to keep adding some more in, and we keep doing those periodically. I think the key thing is that we’re trying to learn from it. We’re trying to learn about how to improve it. Is it about adding in fast charging? What are the key things that people are looking for when they want to charge their car?
And then what we need to do is take those learnings and look at how we implement them. So, yeah, there’s absolutely a short-term, a medium-term, and a long-term plan. But a lot of that has to come with infrastructure as well, and that infrastructure isn’t quite there at the present moment to support large-scale movement on things like electric charge points.
But that’s why we work with the council, other bodies, and also other businesses. We work with places like Chester Zoo because they have a desire as well to get more electric charging points. So we come together as big businesses and look at, “What are they doing that we can learn from? What are we doing? And also, how can we put pressure on to try and move these kinds of things forward in terms of infrastructure?”
Darren Jamieson: Glad you brought that up, actually—what other people are doing that you can learn from. Because that was a question I was going to ask. I’ve been to retail outlets in the US, particularly in Orlando, in Florida, and they look very similar to Cheshire Oaks. The architecture is very similar, the shops are very similar. The Nike store is almost identical—you walk into a Nike store in Orlando, you walk into the Nike store at Cheshire Oaks, you wouldn’t necessarily know which one you were in if you don’t look closely at the pound sign or the dollar sign. Where do you look to see what others are doing and what you want to emulate? And what do you see that you want to be able to do that others are doing?
Kenny Murray: We look everywhere. I mean, if I’m really honest with you, there’s no stone left unturned by us. We look everywhere. Because I think if you restrict your view to just looking in one sector—whether it’s the outlet sector—it’s not the right thing to do. You’ve got to look much broader than that.
And you’re right. If you look at the outlet concept, our founder and our chairman, Joey Kaempfer, brought the outlet concept from America. He brought it across to the UK and delivered the first outlet village at Cheshire Oaks and has then successfully grown that across the UK and Europe.
What I think is interesting is, if you look at Cheshire Oaks—which will turn 30 next year—and our last center that we opened, which we call Paris-Giverny, just outside Paris, the two centers look substantially different in terms of the look.
Because you can see how much the outlet concept has moved on in terms of thinking, the architecture, the layout—all of those kinds of things. But the fundamental thing that’s always stayed the same is the fact that we offer you great brands at great prices every single day.
And that’s always been the point. In terms of where we look, I mean, we obviously look at retail. So we look at what’s happening in full-price retail, more so about what the brands are doing and actually what their requirements are.
Because a successful outlet village needs successful brand partners, and we need to understand what’s happening in their world. What are they doing in terms of their stock packages? What are they doing in terms of the turnover of stock? What are their longer-term plans in terms of strategic development? So we need to understand that part of it.
Then there’s the element around marketing—what is happening, as is in your business as well? If I think about it in my time in the business, in the old days, all of our marketing would have been done via radio, press, all of those kinds of things.
Whereas now, social and digital are much more connected for us. We’re using TikTok platforms now, whereas if you’d gone back probably even just five years ago, for us to be using TikTok wouldn’t have been something that we could have seen ourselves doing.
So we’ve got to make sure that the consumers we’re engaging with, we’re engaging with in the right way and connecting with them. Not only are we looking after the consumers that we’ve got now, but we’re also connecting with what will be our consumers of the future.
In terms of the overall environment and the experience, genuinely, we’re looking everywhere. We look at hotels, we look at visitor attractions—we touched on retail—we look at all of those kinds of things.
It was interesting, I was on holiday a couple of weeks ago in Tenerife, and I was taking pictures of furniture in the hotel that we sat outside because it was really nice. And actually, there was a bit of me like, “Well, if they can deliver these really nice seats with really nice cushions in this hotel outside in Tenerife, could we deliver that in Cheshire Oaks?”
And okay, we get slightly different weather in the Northwest than what you would get in the south part of Tenerife, but that shouldn’t limit our view about what we can do and what we can’t do.
We genuinely obsess over detail. Whether it’s landscaping, whether it’s benches, whether it’s painting, whether it’s decoration—we want it to be really, really good. One of the many comments that we get at Cheshire Oaks and across our portfolio is people turn and say how clean it is, how sharp it is in terms of standards.
These are the things that matter to us because our view is, if the consumer can see that we really, really care about them and want to make sure that they’ve got the best experience, then they absolutely will keep coming back to us.
Darren Jamieson: One of the things I wanted to ask you—again, you touched on it there—about the brands. What makes a good brand good for Cheshire Oaks? To have the stock levels that they’re able to turn them over and move the out-of-season items into the outlet, are there any kinds of brands that you really want to be attracting to Cheshire Oaks that you’ve not yet? Or a brand, maybe, that’s gone that you want to come back?
Kenny Murray: I mean, a lot of what we do is something called “How Was Your Day?” “How Was Your Day?” is a consumer insight study where—we do lots of insight studies where we try to understand more about our consumers and the brands that we want.
One of the most simple ones that we do is “How Was Your Day?” If you’ve come to the center, you either have the opportunity to scan one of our QR codes and give us feedback, or if, for example, you’ve maybe connected to our Wi-Fi, we may send you an email and ask you for your feedback.
Many, many businesses do it. We will ask you lots of different questions, from “How was your day? What was your experience like? What were the stores like?” But one of the questions we ask is, “What brands would you like to see?”
Because we all would like to see different brands. Cheshire Oaks is not just a range of brands that Kenny Murray likes and would shop—it’s got to be a very broad range of brands. The key thing is making sure that they’re reflective of the brands that people want to shop.
Crocs is a great example. So we opened Crocs about four or six weeks ago, and Crocs has just absolutely flown. I mean, the phenomenon of Crocs in the UK right now is just unbelievable. And not just even so much in the Crocs themselves, but you get what they call the Jibbitz, which are the little kind of accessories that you put into them. And that is huge.
Darren Jamieson: Yeah, they’re massive in the outlets in Orlando as well. Always a rammed store there.
Kenny Murray: Absolutely. And I have an eight-year-old daughter, and her big question every single day until we opened Crocs was, “When is Crocs opening?” She was absolutely desperate to come in. And you can see by the demand—the queues that we’ve had—people want to come in and do it. So that’s what’s right in terms of getting the right brands for the consumer. The key thing that we’ve got to do—and you touched on it a little bit—is making sure that we’ve got the stock. There is nothing more frustrating than coming to buy something and, guess what, we don’t have your size.
All we’ve got is, I don’t know, a rack full of extra-smalls or a rack full of triple XLs or something like that. You want to be able to come and get your size. And that, for us, is the key part—working with our brands to make sure they’ve got the right stock depth to manage the customer demand.
Darren Jamieson: One brand I’d personally like to see—I don’t know if it’s even possible—would be Omega.
Kenny Murray: Oh, okay.
Darren Jamieson: I’ve got quite a few, but I have to go to the Trafford Centre for them. That’s a little bit far, and you don’t want to be mentioning them on this podcast, do you? They’re a full-price outlet anyway. But if it’s possible to get a brand like that there, that would be fantastic.
Kenny Murray: Yeah, and of course, some of this depends on whether the brand feels they require an outlet. Again, all of this comes down to what is their overall strategy to manage their stock buying, their stock packages.
If you look at—we’ve got TAG Heuer, for example. TAG does a phenomenal job in terms of the consumer base they’ve got at Cheshire Oaks, but also they’ve got a black book of consumers who are people that would buy TAG day in, day out.
And what they’re constantly doing is making sure, when they get new products coming in, that they’re talking to those consumers and those consumers are coming back in.
So yeah, there are always brands that we would like to get. And sometimes, it’s more of a longer-term conversation with those brands. There are many brands that we have at Cheshire Oaks and across our portfolio that we would want to get now, and it could be five years before we get them into the center.
There are many brands I can think about where we’ve had to work with them for a long, long time until the time was right for them, where they said, “Yeah, actually, now do you know what? We’ve got an outlet strategy, and we’d really like to get into that market and look at how we can attract an outlet consumer.”
Darren Jamieson: One question I’ve always wanted to ask you—because I’ve seen this over the years on Coronation Street—there’s one of the characters on Coronation Street, Sally Metcalfe. I don’t know whether you’re a fan…
Kenny Murray: I’m not a Coronation Street watcher.
Darren Jamieson: You’re not a Coronation Street watcher. She frequently mentions Cheshire Oaks.
Kenny Murray: Okay.
Darren Jamieson: And how, when she’s being all hoity-toity, she’s bought something and it’s really nice and she wants to show off about it, she’ll talk about, “Oh, I bought that at Cheshire Oaks.” I’m just wondering whether Cheshire Oaks pays for that as its marketing, or whether that’s something that just happens. And how do you feel about those mentions, anyway?
Kenny Murray: [Laughs] That’s what you call being incredibly lucky. That’s free advertising for you. So, yeah, we don’t pay for those kinds of things. Not with, you know, in something like Coronation Street. If someone name-checks us or name-drops us, that’s not something that we do.
So that’s where we’re very lucky in those kinds of opportunities. And of course, yeah, anything to get the brand out there is always great in terms of recognition from our perspective.
Darren Jamieson:So you’re getting—what used to be, in its prime, 20 million viewers at a time. So I think something like 11–12 million watch it now, because everybody watches stuff on record. That’s 11 million people seeing Cheshire Oaks getting name-checked on prime-time TV, and that’s just free marketing.
Kenny Murray: [Laughs] Isn’t that a wonderful opportunity?
Darren Jamieson: [Laughs] Realistically, that’s how it works, isn’t it?
Kenny Murray: That’s where we are with it. And I think what’s interesting with brands like Cheshire Oaks is Cheshire Oaks has a high level of awareness because we have been around for nearly 30 years.
In the Northwest and broader, we’ve got a really strong awareness. People know us. Our job from a marketing perspective is always, “How do we reconnect with them? How do we keep you coming?” Or, if you haven’t been for a while, “How do we re-engage with you?” And for new consumers that maybe haven’t been to Cheshire Oaks, “How do we tell them about our proposition and get them to come along and have a look?”
Darren Jamieson: You’ve mentioned the Nike store, and you’ve mentioned TAG. Just wondering, when people think about Cheshire Oaks, are there particular brands they think of—that’s what I’m going to go there for? Do you have, I don’t want you to say pick your favorite child or anything, but do you have marquee brands that you think, yes, that’s what people go to Cheshire Oaks for, that’s why they come?
Kenny Murray: It’s a broad range. So I’m going to give you an answer, but you’re probably going to say I’m not giving you an answer. Cheshire Oaks, with its size and scale, we kind of cut it into—we’ve got it as four phases. So, if you imagine it’s like four quarters, yeah? And what we’ve done in our leasing strategy is that we’ve put like-minded brands together.
So, I’ll not go into technical jargon and talk about the phases, but for example, one of our phases has all of our fashion and lifestyle brands in it. So that phase is anchored by Nike. And then what are you going to see on there? You’re going to see brands like Levi’s, Dr. Martens, Giovanna, all kind of like-minded brands.
Then you move across, and we’ve got what we would class as a high street phase. So you’re going to see Next, you’re going to see Clarks, you’re going to see Moss, you’re going to see those kinds of brands that you would predominantly expect to see on the high street.
Then we have a phase that’s got homeware, so we’ve got like our Denby, our Tefal, our ProCook. Then we’ve got a phase that’s a bit more accessories, so you’ve got your Fossils.
And then we go into our final phase, which is like our luxury designer phase. You’ve got your Burberrys, your Armanis, your Hugo Bosses, your Polo Ralph Laurens.
Why do I talk about it in that way? The reason why is some consumers will come and will shop the whole center. So they’ll come, and they’ll make a day of it, and they’ll walk the whole center. Some people will come and will know that they want to shop a specific part. For example, you touched on earlier—so just recently, we’ve come out of school summer holidays.
So as an example, some of our more local consumers, like the good people from Ellesmere Port, potentially may have come in the last month or two, and they may have shopped Clarks to get their children’s footwear. They may have shopped Next; they may have shopped Skechers, which is becoming really popular for back-to-school.
So you have that consumer. And then you have another consumer that may have driven slightly further because, actually, they want to experience brands that haven’t got full-price bricks-and-mortar presence in the Northwest.
So, for example, who am I talking about? Brands like Armani, for example. Brands like Burberry—brands that you could find in the Northwest, but in a lot of cases, you probably would have to go to a department store for it.
And what you will then get from the stores that we have is you will get a more personalized experience. Touching on TAG, a lot of those brands will have databases where they will get consumers that very much love that brand, and they will continually talk to them about what they’ve got coming in, what they haven’t got coming in, new ranges that are coming through—all of those kinds of things.
So people shop Cheshire Oaks in kind of slightly different ways. But, yeah, of course, there are the high street staples—Marks & Spencer is another great example. People will come for Marks & Spencer.
But we’re really broad. That’s when I think I said earlier on, we introduce, in a lot of cases, new consumers to brands. Because at the end of the day, as soon as you reduce that price point, for some people, it makes it more affordable, and for some people, it makes it more attractive. Because, as I said earlier on, they wouldn’t pay the price on the high street, but they would be happy to buy at a slightly more discounted price.
And at the end of the day, I think, as I said earlier on, everybody loves a bargain. Everybody loves the fact that if you’re able to get something at a substantial discount price, there’s a real pride in being able to say, “I got that. It should have cost £300, and I got it for £150.” And you genuinely feel like you’ve got a bargain, and you’ve still got £50 left in your pocket to spend on whatever you want to spend on.
Darren Jamieson: There’s one section that Cheshire Oaks doesn’t have that Orlando outlets do, and it’s always bugged me because it’s something I’m particularly interested in. I’m a big kid at heart, and people will know I collect a lot of toys.
Darren Jamieson: There hasn’t—well, there was Build-A-Bear, and is there a Hamleys now still in there?
Kenny Murray: No, we did have Hamleys.
Darren Jamieson: Build-A-Bear’s gone, hasn’t it? And Hamleys is gone.
Kenny Murray: Yeah.
Darren Jamieson: So there’s no Toys “R” Us, there’s no Smyths, there’s no toy shop or toy area of any kind. You mentioned bringing the kids in—obviously, they’ve got the play areas, but there’s nothing for kids to say, “Let’s go to Cheshire Oaks because I want to go to that shop.”
So have you got any plans, or are there any brands that sell toys that would work in an outlet? Lego, for example. Or are they just not the kind of brand that needs to sell stuff in an outlet because they can always sell at maximum price?
Kenny Murray: No, there is—we’re always looking at category management. So we always look at, of the categories that we’ve got in our centers and Cheshire Oaks, where have we got too much, where have we got not enough, and where have we got nothing at all.
And I think you’ve picked a great category, which is toys. It’s a market that we’ve been in. If I look back over the 29 years, there are lots of toy brands that we’ve had at Cheshire Oaks over the years, but it’s just never quite worked for those brands.
And I think, generally, if you think about the Toys “R” Us model, if you think about the Smyths model, they are very much big warehouse units where you go in, and in a lot of cases—certainly if you think about Smyths—they are already at a very, very affordable price.
You then bring them into an outlet, and in some cases with children’s toys, it’s about volume. Can you then get that same volume through so it remains an aspiration for us to bring in children’s toys?
So it’s not a strategic decision that we’ve made to say, “Well, we don’t want it because it doesn’t work for us.” We would love to do it. Brands like Lego—absolutely, we would love to do something, but Lego are not in the market for doing anything at the present moment.
There are other brands as well that we would love to have, but currently, they’re not in the market for having an outlet. But that’s where I continually go back to saying we continue to discuss them.
And where we always want to be is to have a relationship with those brands so that one day, when the time is right, they say, “We have an opportunity.” And what we’ve learned a little bit is, sometimes that might not be doing a five-year deal with them.
They might say, “We’ve got an opportunity for the next six months, we want to do something with you.” Then we’re open to them. A completely different category to toys, but it’s beauty.
If you look at Charlotte Tilbury, Charlotte Tilbury is a phenomenal brand with a phenomenal following. We’ve always wanted Charlotte Tilbury in the outlets, and we’ve been able to add them to our lineup.
They joined us in 2022, joined us in 2023, and they’re with us again in 2024. And that’s not on a permanent leasing—that’s on them saying, “We have a requirement over six months of the year. We would like to come in for six months.”
And we said, “Absolutely, let’s make this work. Let’s work together and make it work.” So, as a business, we are very flexible and agile in the way that we work with brand partners.
And we understand that sometimes it’s not just as simple as saying, “That’s it, there we want it, we want it to fit into this box.” Sometimes we need to work with that brand to make it work for them and to make it work for us.
So to go back to your point in terms of toys, if we can find operators, even where we bring them in at key moments, that’s absolutely something that we would do if we can find the right brand.
Darren Jamieson: Let’s talk about marketing. So, obviously, that’s what this podcast is supposed to be about—it really is, that’s what it’s meant to be about. How do you actually promote and market Cheshire Oaks?
Again, one daft question I’ve got straight off the bat is, we get those emails from that company selling advertising on roundabouts—I’m sure businesses all over the UK get those. We looked at the predicted traffic around roundabouts, and the only roundabout in this area that had any value in terms of numbers and worth advertising on was the one at Cheshire Oaks—and you advertise on it.
So what’s the thinking behind Cheshire Oaks advertising on the roundabout in front of Cheshire Oaks?
Kenny Murray: Fundamentally for us, it’s about customer journey. We think about everything. You touched on marketing—we think about the customer journey not from when you drive through the gates of Cheshire Oaks and park up, but from the moment you sit in your chair at home, or wherever, and make the decision that you want to come to Cheshire Oaks this weekend or in a couple of weeks’ time.
For us, it’s really, really important that everything we do is about the customer journey. So, you take those roundabouts. For us, it’s about the fact that as soon as you come off that M53 and come down to that first roundabout, we’re there, right there.
Then, as you come around to the next roundabout in front of our development, we’re there so that you know you’ve arrived at Cheshire Oaks Designer Outlet as soon as you come off that motorway.
We’ve got—just as an aside—we have a peak traffic management plan. We have a traffic management plan that we use every weekend. We have a peak traffic management plan. We work with national highways, we work with Cheshire Police, we work with local highways.
We actually manage everything traffic-wise on peak days from when you come off the M53 into the center to getting you back on that M53 again.
The reason why we’ve done that is because we know that what will make or break your visit is your experience arriving or departing. You could come to Cheshire Oaks on a bank holiday and have a wonderful day—the best day you’ve ever had—but then you struggle to get out because of the traffic on the main road.
Your recollection of that visit is, “The traffic was dreadful getting out on the main road, it took me ages.”
So that’s why we think an awful lot about customer journey. That’s why our website is so important, in terms of how we guide people to Cheshire Oaks around the offers we’ve got, the brands we’ve got.
We touched on earlier about the ways you can get to Cheshire Oaks—all those kinds of things are really important to us. How do we make your visit to Cheshire Oaks as stress-free as we can? That’s our objective, and that’s our aim.
Darren Jamieson: When you mentioned signage and coming off the M53, one thing that’s always struck me as being a bit strange—when you come off the M56 and get onto the M53, that big road sign mentions Ellesmere Port, it mentions Stanlow, it doesn’t mention Cheshire Oaks. So it’s quite easy, if you’re not local, to go past that entrance, then see the big sign for Cheshire Oaks—which you can see for miles around—realize you’ve missed that turning, and have to go to the next one.
Is there any way that a sign for Cheshire Oaks can be added to that or brought forward? Have you had these conversations before?
Kenny Murray: Unfortunately, it’s out of our remit. I mean, we would love to do it. At the end of the day, again, we want to make your journey as easy as possible. But as soon as you come off our land, we are bound by the rules and jurisdictions that they have.
As I said, we work a lot with Cheshire West and Chester Council, we work a lot with national highways, but they have policies and procedures. What you’re talking about sits with national highways.
I understand that they have these processes and procedures in place, and that’s where we’ve just got to continue to work with them to try and make journeys for people as easy as we can. But yeah, if I could change that, I would love to do it. Unfortunately, it’s out of my control.
Darren Jamieson: Because it’s going to cause people problems; it’s going to cause traffic the other way then. But anyway, it frustrates me.
So in terms of the marketing, then, what do you find are the most effective ways to promote Cheshire Oaks? Or is it a case that you don’t need to do any marketing—you’re so big, everybody knows where you are, and you get mentions on Coronation Street?
Kenny Murray: My goodness, wouldn’t that be lovely? That would save me an awful lot of money, wouldn’t it? That would be lovely. No, I mean, we touched on earlier on—I said that our awareness within the Northwest is broader.
We would never say, actually, we’re so big we don’t need to market. I think where we spend a lot of our time is marketing the proposition. It’s around how do we—
I remember that people used to talk about this when they talked about credit cards. I’m not sure it’s maybe the same now, because we’ve all got our credit cards on Apple Pay, but it is similar.
I remember someone in the credit card world saying to me, for them, it was all about front of mind—but they called it “front of wallet.” How did that credit card company get to the front of your wallet?
Because if they got to the front of your wallet, it meant that you would use that card predominantly when you went to do your shopping.
It’s the same for us. We’re different to high street; we’re a day out. If you’re having a day out, how do we make sure that we’re front of mind, that you think about Cheshire Oaks?
So we make sure that our marketing strategy is very much tied around that. So throughout the year, we will—as all retailers will do—talk about spring/summer, we’ll talk about autumn/winter.
But we’ll also do a lot of work around the key events that we’ve got, the key moments. Whether that’s promotional campaigns that we have throughout the year, or things like the Summer Social I talked about, or the Christmas Village that we have every year.
Those are the kinds of things that we communicate with. The other thing I touched on earlier on—in the old days, we would have used more newspapers and all those kinds of things.
The one thing that digital has allowed us to do now is—how do we tailor our communication? How do we make sure that—
I think you said earlier on, for example, I think it was toys you mentioned. So if toys are something you’re interested in specifically, and we have toy brands that suit you, how do we make sure that communication comes to you and is tailored for you?
If I’m not interested in that, but I’m interested in something else, how do we make sure that communication is tailored?
Because what we know is, if we keep sending you communications that are relatively irrelevant to you and don’t interest you, you’ll stop clicking on them. You’ll stop opening them.
And then we run the risk that, at some point, you might unsubscribe from us. So how do we make sure that our content is current to you and relevant to you?
That’s a big part of what we’re doing, and we’ve got so much more to do in that space in terms of learning more about our consumer.
We launched a loyalty scheme a couple of years ago called MG Club. MG Club is not what you would call in the sector a “burn and earn,” like Tesco’s, where you spend and you earn points.
What we wanted to do was create a club where you sign up as a member. And then what we do is talk to you about offers that we’ve got coming on, and we talk about what is relevant to you.
When you join up, you get a 10% discount straight away for doing it. We will send you that periodically on your birthday.
But also, we get you to put all your preferences in. So we get you to tell us what are the things that interest you, and then we can make sure that in our email communication and in our offers that we push to you, we send you the most relevant thing to keep you engaged.
Darren Jamieson: Do you know how many people you’ve got on that mailing list, out of curiosity?
Kenny Murray: We’ve probably got about a quarter of a million people that sit on that database. And I think for us, what’s interesting is it’s about quality over quantity. If I go back six or seven years ago, that database would have been higher.
But what you found—and I don’t know if businesses like yours found this—but in the early days of emails and databases, businesses were signing people up, but people would sign up and potentially not use a factual email address, or sign up but then disengage really quickly. Or they’d have a burner email they use for this kind of thing—a Hotmail account they don’t really log into. I think that’s why so many businesses at the time were just firing out emails all the time. People just got really switched off to it.
So that’s why, for us, it’s more about quality over quantity. Actually, if what we’ve got is a database of, say, a quarter of a million people that is much more engaged with us, interested, engaged, and wants to understand more, that to me is much more valuable than having half a million people on a database where some of the email addresses are not right, and some of them are not engaging with us. That’s naturally really important to us.
Darren Jamieson: Do you use that email database for something like social media marketing as well?
Kenny Murray: No. I mean, it’s predominantly just used for our database marketing. It’s only to send out communications to people and to use that.
We’ve obviously got, as lots of businesses do, our Facebook site, our Instagram, and our TikTok—that’s where we’re doing a lot of our social content.
Darren Jamieson: Well, the reason I suggest it is, when a company comes to us, for example, and they’ve got a big email database or a big customer database, it’s like gold because you’ve got those profiles of all those people there.
Say one of our clients is a garden center, for example. They can take their customer database of however many thousands of people, upload that into Facebook, and Facebook will match those customers with profiles.
So maybe 50% of them will match, maybe 40% of them will match. Then you’ll be able to run ads to those people—to your existing customers—also based on locality and interests, to target them to come back for particular promotions that you’re running.
So you mentioned not everybody opens emails, not everybody uses emails. That database can be used in different ways to target people to come back to Cheshire Oaks.
Kenny Murray: Sure. Yeah. I mean, I think what’s been interesting for us as well is thinking about the different consumer groups in terms of the different age profiles and how they’re engaging. You’ll know better than I do—things like the younger generation, they’re less about Facebook but much more about TikTok.
Again, I think this has been quite an interesting change for us, just in terms of that tone of voice, how we’re communicating, and what we’re doing. That element of being less corporate and probably more fun on things like TikTok is an example.
I think for any business, it’s about finding that nice place to be in terms of how you communicate on TikTok versus how you communicate on Facebook. Actually, how you reach out to the consumer in a relevant way to them. Of course, we’re learning and developing in these spaces all the time.
Darren Jamieson: Do you have a budget you set aside to do marketing such as this? And one question I’ve always thought of is, do the brands actually contribute towards marketing, or do they just leave it all up to you and they do their own thing?
Kenny Murray: No. I mean, at the end of the day, the one advantage for brands coming into an outlet center is that when you come in, you are guaranteed the footfall we’ve got coming on an annual basis. So if you open your store tomorrow, you know straight away how many people, realistically, are going to be passing your doors every single day. Our job with the brand partners is very much to continue to drive the marketing for Cheshire Oaks—to drive more footfall, to drive the right type of consumer, and to make sure that we’re driving them to their stores. Once we get the people over their door, they can make sure they’ve got the right product in place, the right service, the right store, and the right experience so that they’re best placed to look after that customer’s needs.
Darren Jamieson: When I last saw you, you did a talk about the revenue that the brands were doing year on year. You talked about how much it had increased. Do you have a target for 2024 or an expectancy for what’s going to happen through 2024 for Cheshire Oaks?
Kenny Murray: Yeah, I mean, like anything, we always want to grow the business. Every year at Cheshire Oaks, we grow our footfall, we grow our spend, and we grow our turnover. Fundamentally, if we don’t, we’re not particularly driving or doing things successfully. That’s what we want to do—we want to see all of our brands grow. We have seen continuous growth from Cheshire Oaks. The only years—like all businesses—that were interesting times for us were the pandemic of 2020 and 2021.
What was interesting was the day that we went into lockdown one in 2020 was actually our 25th anniversary. Being in Cheshire Oaks during lockdown one, on the times where I would go across to make sure everything was all right, it was quite an eerie place to be.
It was only really those two years where we saw a decline. Since then, we’ve seen continuous growth.
That comes from the fact that we make sure we understand what our consumers are looking for. We make sure that we understand the brands—what they’re looking for experience-wise, what they’re looking for service-wise—and then matching them with the brands.
One of the things we pride ourselves on is having a very clear retail focus with our brands. We have a Retail Brand Academy where we have online training modules for all of our brands.
So if you are one of our stores, there is an online platform where you can go on and get access to training modules. If you want to get one of your sales team members, who you think could improve on, let’s say, closing the sale or opening the sale or customer service, we will have modules for that.
Again, what we’re looking at all the time is, how do we ensure that we are best within the market? It comes back to that element of no complacency.
That’s not being complacent about the fact that just because we’ve been around for nearly 30 years and just because we’re the largest in the UK means that people will automatically come to us.
People don’t have blank checkbooks. People have a budget—a certain amount of money they need to spend every single month. What we want to make sure is that if they come to Cheshire Oaks, we’re best placed so that if they want to spend their money with us, they can get everything they want when they’re at Cheshire Oaks.
So if we can continually work with the brand partners to really develop what they do, develop the experience, develop the offer, and look at how they develop their stock packages, then that’s a win-win for the consumer.
Darren Jamieson: And do they all use that training? It just seems that to have training modules showing Nike or TAG Heuer, “This is how you manage a shop,” do they all embrace that?
Kenny Murray: No. At the end of the day, it’s not for everyone. That’s the key thing. Many brands have their own brand ethos, their own way that they are. In many places, they call it their “brand playbook,” in terms of how their staff should look, how their staff should serve, how their staff should be. Let’s be very clear about it—we’re not trying to tell the brands how they should be running their stores.
They know their brand better than us. Our job is to support them. What we do know is that, if you take the 160 brands that we’ve got, not every single one of them may have that infrastructure. So, for us, it’s about how do we give them those modules if they require them? If they want to add to what they already have, they’ve got that.
It’s very well used in terms of the amount of brands that sign up to it and the amount of brands that use it. The thing we’ve learned over the years, certainly with tech now, is it’s about how can you give someone a bite-sized module?
It’s a Saturday morning, it’s first thing in the morning, I’ve got enough staff on the sales floor, and I say to one of my team, “Go and take 30 minutes off the sales floor on your smart device and go do a module on customer service, as an example.” And then they do that. It goes back as well to when we talked about the employment numbers. One of the key things that we see at Cheshire Oaks is there are people who have been there for nearly 30 years.
There are people who have moved from store to store—people who have gone from coming in maybe as a part-time sales associate when they were in college or at school, and then they’ve decided to go into a career in retail. They’ve gone from being a sales associate to a supervisor, then an assistant manager, then a manager, and then they’ve gone from managing a small store to a medium store, and now they might run a flagship. Again, these things are all important. They’re able to talk about their experience at Cheshire Oaks but also where they’ve learned and developed. It gives real kudos to a lot of the brands because they know what we do with the staff on the center. They’re interested in it when they start to interview staff, for example.
Darren Jamieson: You mentioned earlier about the play area, which cost—how much was that? That was a huge sum of money. You invested a lot of money.
Kenny Murray: Yeah, it was a significant amount of money, but it was absolutely worth it. The key thing was it’s not an off-the-peg play area. What it was about was creating something that was quite unique, and what it has done for us is just phenomenal.
Darren Jamieson: So that, obviously, was a huge bit of development that you did. You’ve built—is it a new car park at the back in the last few years? You’ve redeveloped that part in the middle, which is the—what’s that new store? I say new store; in the last four or five years…
Kenny Murray: The Polo Ralph Lauren store?
Darren Jamieson: That’s the one, yeah.
Kenny Murray: Yeah, that’s been there since 2018.
Darren Jamieson: 2018, wow. Think about that, it feels like yesterday. What developments are you looking to do next? What’s the next big thing that you’re going to be doing?
Kenny Murray: There’s nothing at the present moment that really stands out. I think the development you were talking about was what we called the 2018 modernization plan. What we did with that was we wanted to add some additional retail because the requirement was there. So we added about another 40,000 square feet of retail space at that time. But we also wanted to modernize our toilet blocks. We wanted to add in more car parking—all those kinds of things. There were some things where car park entrances would have been better if they were relocated, so we did all those kinds of things. The idea was, again, to make sure that, one, if we go back to the experience, if you come to the center, you want to go to a clean, nice set of toilets. You want that to be a pleasant experience. If you’ve got children and need to use a baby change facility, that needs to look nice and be pristine. That’s what we wanted to do.
The additional car parking was about helping us on peak days, helping the peak traffic management plan, helping flows—how did we make it easier for you to find a space on big days? And then the retail was just about adding to the overall offer. The play area is just such a key part for us. We had an older play area that had a high amount of usage. Sometimes I wish we’d put a little footfall counter on it so I could tell people how many kids used it. If you’ve seen it, we’ve got great big towers that the kids go up and come down the slides. Some days, on busy days, I look at it and it’s like ants going up and down. You hear the squeals of enjoyment and fun, and kids are just desperate to get into it. It’s absolutely worth every single penny.
Because, as I always say—even about my own holiday—if the kids are happy, then we’re happy. We know that wherever we go, if the kids are happy, we’ll have a better time.
It’s the same thing when you go shopping, isn’t it? If you’re going to a wedding in a month’s time, and you and your partner need to go out and get some outfits, you’ve got to bring the kids with you. If the kids are moaning and complaining because they’re going shopping and they don’t really want to do it, it’s not a great experience for you. It becomes quite stressful.
But actually, if the kids know, “Okay, great, I’m going to get to go in the play area or I’m going to get to go to McDonald’s for lunch,” or wherever you’re going to go, those are the kinds of things that make it less stressful for you when you come and get that overall experience.
So to go back to your question, there’s nothing in the future that we’re looking at at the present moment, but we’re always exploring opportunities.
We have plans to relocate guest services. We’ve got our guest services with our guest experience team based there. We’re going to move that to a new home, which will be just next door to Marks & Spencer.
Again, the idea with that is, how do we make sure that our guest experience lounge or suite has all the things you kind of need? If you want to go in and get services, how do we make sure we’ve got that?
That will happen relatively imminently, and then we’re always working. One of the interesting things about managing and operating a center of the size and scale of Cheshire Oaks is we are always doing work on it.
It’s a very well-maintained asset, coming up for 30 years old. One, we want to make sure that it’s a safe place to come and shop and a safe place to work. But also, we want to make sure that asset looks good. As you arrive, we’re always out painting, maintaining the landscaping, and doing all those kinds of things.We try to make sure all those things happen before people come and shop. It’s really, really important because it goes back to that point of, if you come and we haven’t taken the time to make sure the landscaping looks good, then that’s not particularly great. Because you think, “Well, if they don’t care about the fact that they’ve got dead plants, then they don’t really care about me.”
That’s why we really want to make sure we get so many comments about our landscaping. People come into guest services in the summertime and say, “Your landscaping looks fantastic.”
Or they’ll come in and say, “Can you pass on my compliments to the cleaning team because they’ve done an excellent job keeping the toilets clean?”
These are the things that genuinely matter. It goes back to what I was talking about with you in terms of your experience arriving and departing from the center.
You can have a fantastic time, but if something happens—if the last place you go is the toilets and they’re not particularly clean and not great—that is your memory of going away. That’s why we spend so much time focusing on those things to make sure that we’ve really got them top-notch.
Darren Jamieson: It reminds me of the Severn Bridge, I think it was. They’re always cleaning it, always painting it from one end to the other. Cheshire Oaks obviously is so bloody big—how do you keep that clean? How do you keep it looking fresh and updated?
Kenny Murray: Yeah, and that’s what I was touching on when I talked about the maintenance piece. It is ongoing. We’re always working on it—it’s a big asset. It’s really important. People genuinely—many times, people say to me, “I’m not quite sure people will really see that level of detail.” But people do – particularly when they’re up in the wheel. If you’ve been up in the wheel, you get a very good view of the site, including the rooftops.
Darren Jamieson: Yeah, I went up in the wheel and thought, “Oh, that roof looks good.”
Kenny Murray: [Laughs] Particularly in the wheel, yeah. Customers will go into guest services and comment or compliment. Quite rightly, they’ll also come and tell us when we’re not doing things right.
At the end of the day, we don’t always get everything right. It’s really important—people notice that level of detail. And it’s vital. It’s a big asset, and we’ve got to make sure it’s a safe place to shop and a safe place to work. For us, going through the COVID years, that was very, very important.
That was super important to us—that we were a safe place to shop and a safe place to work. The center gets that level of investment continually in terms of what we’re doing—in terms of, to your point, painting, landscaping, and maintaining it.
Again, we touched on our guest experience team. These people, as well, we couldn’t run Cheshire Oaks without them. The people that are around the back, emptying the bins, painting the premises, sorting the slabs—all this kind of stuff.
They are the unsung heroes of Cheshire Oaks. They’re the people that make sure it’s spot-on every single day but aren’t the ones the guests see. The guests see our front-facing guest experience team.
Darren Jamieson: Actually, there was one question I meant to ask but forgot about it. Dogs. I’ve seen signs up—so is it official policy that dogs aren’t allowed on Cheshire Oaks?
Kenny Murray: No, dogs are allowed.
Darren Jamieson: Oh, okay.
Kenny Murray: Yeah, dogs are allowed on Cheshire Oaks Designer Outlet. There may be some confusion with signs at the Coliseum.
Darren Jamieson: Ah, that might be where I saw it.
Kenny Murray: Yeah. Dogs need to be socialized, of course, but we allow them. The reason why we did it is that we draw customers from up to 90 minutes away, and particularly through the COVID years, a lot of people purchased dogs. They talked about it—how dog ownership surged during that period.
And, of course, now we’re seeing it. A lot of these dogs, you can pretty much pick them up in one arm. We’re not talking about people with huge dogs, although they’re welcome, too.
It’s hugely important to people to bring their dogs. You’re right—if you’re traveling from a distance, what are you going to do? We don’t want people leaving dogs in cars. We all know that it can feel cool outside one minute and then the weather can change.
If I’m honest, we find that our guests are very respectful of this. If they bring dogs, they’re super respectful. They clean up after them.
We’ve got a new operator on-site called Digby and Champ. They do dog treats, dog accessories—all of those kinds of things. Dogs are very important to people, so that’s why we allow them on-site.
Darren Jamieson: Excellent, that’s good. When this podcast goes out, it’s going to be December, and we’ll be in the middle of Christmas, which is obviously the busiest time for Cheshire Oaks. You guys do an incredible job transforming the whole thing into some sort of massive grotto. You have that huge, great big bloody tree which you can see for literally miles around.
Years ago, you used to do a huge thing about switching on that tree, and you used to get people out from X Factor or Pop Idol. I remember Little Mix did it a long, long time ago. I don’t even want to think how long ago that is because it makes me think how old I am.
How much effort goes into Christmas and transforming it? And how much business is done in percentage terms during that November-December period?
Kenny Murray: To take your last point first—if you look at retail in general, the majority of business is taken over what we call the “golden quarter,” which is October, November, and December. But you’re right—it’s fundamentally November and December.
The reason why it’s so important to us—and to our brands—is that, for many brands, it’s make or break. For many brands, if they have a bad Q4, it could be the thing that, in some cases, causes them to fold in the following year. So it’s really important that we have a very successful Q4 for our brands. That’s the opportunity to make your big money.
It’s when consumers are out, and consumers want to do gifting. Gifting with us is important—we want to make sure that you’re in a good place to buy your family some nice gifts and get them from Cheshire Oaks.
Where we spend our focus and attention now is on that experience element. How do we make a shopping trip to Cheshire Oaks more than just about, “I need to go out and get Christmas shopping presents?”
Everybody shops in a slightly different way. Some people will come out on what we call “mission shopping.” I always say Christmas Eve is a little bit like that. You see people out on Christmas Eve who have kept saying all through December, “I need to go and get Christmas shopping,” and then suddenly it’s the last day. They’re out, they’ve got a list, and they know they need to get it all before the stores close.
But then there are many people who go out and do it with family or with friends. We see a lot of that.
Families will come out Christmas shopping. People will come out with friends. For example, groups of girls might come out together and make a day of it.
They’ll do some of their Christmas shopping, have some lunch with us, and use some of the experiential elements we’ve got—whether it’s the big wheel or any of those kinds of things. It’s very, very important that we get it right.
To your point, when do we start on it? Pretty much on January 1st.
Darren Jamieson: Wow.
Kenny Murray: It’s like we do Christmas, then we come back, take a little breath, and then we’re debriefing and working out what worked well and what we would do slightly differently the following year.
The key thing is always, how do we keep it fresh? That, for me, is always the big thing. How do we keep it fresh? Because if we become repetitive and keep doing the same thing all the time, it becomes a little bit boring to the consumer. How do we stay up-to-date with what is happening?
For example, we always have the carousel there, and there’s nothing more classic than a carousel at Christmastime. People love it—being wrapped up with their coats and scarves, getting on the carousel with the kids.
Again, it’s about memorable moments. It’s about that opportunity where suddenly you’ve got a picture of Dad on the carousel with the kids, or Mum on the carousel with the kids. Those are the kinds of things you remember.
So yeah, it’s very important to us. It’s a very busy time for us. It’s a busy time for the McArthurGlen team on-site, a busy time for all of our contractors, our cleaning, our security. But it’s also a busy time for our brand partners. That’s where we expand our job numbers.
We touched on earlier how we probably add another 300 to 400 people on temporary vacancies. These are normally local people who have maybe gone away to college or university, come back, and have the opportunity to work with us. Those are the kinds of things we focus on.
Darren Jamieson: And if there are any brands out there listening to this thinking, “I’d love to get involved, I’d love to actually have something at Cheshire Oaks,” you have smaller units as well, don’t you? It’s not all big brands. There are opportunities for smaller businesses. How do they get involved?
Kenny Murray: Yeah, I mean, brands can contact us all the time. Businesses can contact us all the time. You’re right—we’ve got a wide range. We’ve got commercialization operators, as we call them. So if you come down to Cheshire Oaks, we’ve got food trucks that sell crepes and donuts. We’ve just got a vegan cookie operator that’s joined us. We’ve got a small unit called Quick Stitch, which does alterations. For example, if you’re going to a wedding in a month’s time, you buy your suit, and you need your trousers altered, we’ve got someone on-site that can do that.
These are the kinds of things we do. Then we do pop-up opportunities. Some of our vacant stores, while they’re in transition, can be used for smaller things. Then we go right up to the longer-term leases we do with many of our brand partners.
We try to work with people all the time. Sometimes we can’t always make it fit and work, but we’re always happy to get into dialogue and see what the future looks like. Sometimes it may take a little longer. For example, there’s a brand called Bee, which is out there. We’ve known Bee in Italy for a long time, probably since the pandemic. They had an ambition to grow a brand focusing on mental health, well-being, and all those kinds of things. We talked to them for a long, long time. Then we were able to do something just after the pandemic where we had a unit. We encouraged them to come along and worked with them year on year since then.
They were with us last Christmas, for example. So, the timing’s not always going to be right straight away.
We can’t be all things to all people, and we can’t always do those deals that maybe people want us to do. But we’re certainly happy to get into dialogue and look at how we can support brands in getting on their feet.
Sometimes we might even say, “Look, we’re not the right place to do this. But actually, why don’t you contact someone from Chester city center?” Because we know people there, and they might have a small unit that’s better suited.
So yeah, anyone can reach out to us as a team. Reach out to the leasing team, or reach out to one of us, and we can have a conversation to see what the future looks like.
Darren Jamieson: And as a final point, thinking about the future—what about you personally? Is your plan to be the general manager of Cheshire Oaks for the foreseeable future? For the next decade?
Kenny Murray: My goodness, that’s an interesting question, isn’t it? I don’t know. I mean, like anything, I’ve worked for McArthurGlen for 21 years. When I joined McArthurGlen, if you’d asked me if I’d still be there 21 years later, the answer probably would have been no.
I’ve been super lucky that as a business, McArthurGlen has given me a huge amount of opportunities. I’ve worked across four centers within our UK portfolio out of the seven.
I also operated one of our first centers out in Europe—I ran Berlin. I’ve been really lucky that the opportunities have been there for me. That’s why I now find myself at Cheshire Oaks, running the largest center.
Will I be there until the day I retire? I’d probably be surprised if I am. I think, like anything, I hope to see myself progressing within the McArthurGlen business.
But also, what I think is interesting and good is getting a fresh pair of eyes on things. As a team, the team is always consistently changing periodically. I am an individual who actually thinks change can be good. Change can be interesting. Not change for change’s sake, but bringing different people in with different points of view. Just different outlooks on what that looks like. That sometimes makes us look at things a little differently and think a little differently.
The bit I’m really clear on is that Cheshire Oaks will be there long after Kenny Murray. Fundamentally, you look at it—it’s 30 years down the line, and it’s still there. I’m sure it’ll be there for another 30 years and beyond. It’s my time to look after it now, but people will come in after me and continue to take it forward. The interesting point is, as you touched on development, it’s wonderful to manage an asset that’s 30 years old. If you had a blank checkbook and could spend as much money on it, you could continually improve it and make it better.
That’s what makes it super exciting with Cheshire Oaks. You’re not managing and operating something where you think, “We’ve maxed out, and we can’t do anything.” There are opportunities to evolve the brand mix, evolve the experiential offerings, and look at how you develop the experience. That’s the most important part, because that’s what will keep it current with the consumer group that we’ve got.
Darren Jamieson: It sounds quite exciting, with all the possibilities you’ve got. It must be difficult to choose what you want to do next.
Kenny Murray: Yeah, like anything, I think it’s identifying what is most relevant to that time.The one thing about McArthurGlen and Cheshire Oaks is that we put the customer at the heart of everything we do. That is the most important thing to us. Any decision we make, we always ask, “Where’s the customer in that?”
When I talk about the customer, I also mean our brand partners. There’s a reason why we call our brands our “brand partners,” because we are in a partnership with them. These kinds of things are really important. When we’re thinking about our decision-making process, it’s about how this will impact our consumers and how this will impact our brands. How do we improve the experience for both?
Darren Jamieson: Kenny, thank you for being on the podcast.
Kenny Murray: Thank you. It’s been a pleasure. I’ve loved it, and I’ve learned so much about Cheshire Oaks that I didn’t know before.
Darren Jamieson: Well, it’s been great. Thank you for your time.
Kenny Murray: Thank you.
