Fortnum & Mason opened a shop in Heathrow Terminal 2, The Queen’s Terminal, on 6 November, adding a retail unit at an airport where the company already runs a bar in Terminal 5, expanded earlier this year.
Goods on sale run from teas and biscuits to confectionery, hampers and seasonal collections, with tasting available in store. A separate service area handles personalisation and in-store ordering, taking requests that a shelf display cannot.
Tom Athron, the chief executive, described the opening as a significant milestone in the brand’s growth strategy and said Heathrow was a natural home for a brand built on travel and discovery.
Fortnum & Mason is a member of the Heathrow Business Coalition, a group of companies with commercial interests at the airport.
What the shop carries
The range is built for carrying. Sealed teas, tins, boxed confectionery and hampers survive a flight better than fresh food, and they suit a buyer with limited space in a bag. Seasonal collections give the unit something to change through the year.
Tasting puts staff in front of the product rather than behind a till, and it takes space that a standard airport outlet would give to shelving. Both are costs that the opening carries before a single sale is made.
Personalisation and ordering mark a further departure from a shelf-only shop. Both depend on staff time and on space behind the counter, so the unit is a larger operational commitment than its floor area suggests.
Details of the range, the service area and the strategic rationale were supplied by the company. No sales figures, footfall estimates or revenue projections for the new unit were disclosed, and there is no independent data on how the store is trading.
Sales at an airport unit depend on the number of passengers passing the shop and on how much time they have before departure. Neither figure has been published for this site, which leaves the commercial test of the opening unquantified for now.
Reading the opening
A retail unit in a terminal is a fixed-cost commitment: rent, staffing and stock are carried whether or not passenger numbers hold. For a food and drink company whose growth strategy has been described in terms of new sites, Terminal 2 is a bet on departing passengers buying gifts and food to take with them.
An airport unit also works differently from a street shop. The customer base changes daily and cannot be counted on to return, so a range has to serve a first-time buyer with little time to spare and no chance to come back for a forgotten item.
The description of the strategy is the company’s own. No target for the number of sites, and no timetable beyond this opening, has been published.
Whether the shop is followed by further units at the airport has not been said. The Terminal 5 bar continues to trade, and the two sites sit in terminals with different passenger profiles.
What happens next
The shop is open from 6 November to passengers departing through Terminal 2. Its contribution will become visible only if the company reports figures for the site or for airport retail as a whole.
For travellers, the practical change is a wider choice of packaged food and gifts before departure. For the brand, the question the opening leaves open is whether airport spending holds up through the winter, a period for which the company has released no forward guidance.
