Most people choose a retail location the wrong way round. They fall for a unit, fall in love with the street, then go looking for evidence to justify it. Or they pick on rent alone, because rent is the number that's easiest to compare and the one everyone negotiates hardest on. I think that's backwards, and it's cost people a lot more than the rent they saved.
I've looked at a lot of locations for Lisa Angel over the years; some we've opened, most we haven't. What I want to share here isn't a checklist. It's genuinely how I think about it, before any checklist gets involved.
Start at your desk, not on the train
The first thing I do when a location comes onto my radar has nothing to do with visiting it. I don't want to spend a day travelling somewhere only to find out in the first ten minutes that it's not right. So I start online.
I'll put the street into Google Street View and just look. What's either side of the unit? What does the street feel like? Is it busy shops or half-shuttered? I'll search for local news: anything about closures, openings, planning changes, a new car park, a retailer pulling out of the area. I want a rough profile of the town or the street before I've spent a penny on travel.
Sometimes the unit itself isn't even available yet. That's fine. Sometimes it's still worth knowing you want to be there, so that when the opportunity does come up, you can move fast instead of starting the research from zero.
Footfall means nothing on its own
Once I've shortlisted a few places from the desk research, I go and spend time there in person. And what I'm doing isn't really looking at the unit. It's watching the people.
Footfall on its own tells you almost nothing. If people are just passing through (commuters cutting between a station and an office, say), your peel-off rate is going to be low no matter how many people walk past. What I'm actually looking for is footfall that's likely to convert.
So I watch which side of the street people are walking on. I look at what they're carrying. Is it supermarket bags, retail bags, or nothing at all? That tells you a lot about whether they're there to shop or just moving between two other places. I'll notice where a street looks busy and then suddenly goes quiet: people peeling off into a big anchor shop or a restaurant and not continuing past it. If nobody's walking past where your unit would be, it doesn't matter how many people are on the street a hundred yards away.
I also look at the practical pull of the street: is there a car park nearby, a train station, a tourist attraction, a university pulling in a constant supply of students? Each of those brings a different kind of footfall, with a different kind of spending behaviour attached to it.
Read the shop, not just the street
The unit itself matters too, but not in the way people usually think. A narrow path with a big window works completely differently to a wide path with a small window. If you're on a side street to save money on rent, the real question is whether anyone actually walks down it. A striking sign means nothing if nobody recognises the brand enough to detour for it.
And I'm trying to match the people I'm seeing against my actual customer. Age, gender, the way they're dressed, what they're carrying. Does the person walking past look like someone who'd buy from us? You can have a genuinely busy street that's completely wrong for your brand.
Come back. More than once.
One visit tells you almost nothing reliable. A location can look dead on a Tuesday at ten in the morning and be thriving by Saturday afternoon, or the other way round. I always try to see a place on at least two very different days, ideally a quiet weekday and a weekend, so I'm not making a decision off one unrepresentative snapshot.
I document all of it. Photos of the shops, inside and outside where I can, video if I can get it, notes on what I noticed each visit. It might be a year or two before the right unit on the right street actually comes up, so I want a real record I can go back to, not a memory of a feeling I had once.
Talk to the people who already know
This is the part I think most people skip, and it's probably given me my best insights of all: talk to the shopkeepers who are already there.
Go in as a potential customer. Ask what it's like at the weekend versus midweek. Ask if trade's been getting better or worse. Talk to two or three different people if you can, because you'll get different angles from different owners. If you can, talk to someone who looks like your actual target customer too. They'll tell you things you'd never work out from a spreadsheet.
People who work or live on a street have already done a huge amount of research for you, for free. They'll tell you if there's a similar brand nearby worth being close to, or a complementary one that's already pulling in the exact customer you want. That's market intelligence you simply can't get from a footfall report.
Why I don't just hand this over as a checklist
None of this is complicated, but it is a lot of separate judgement calls, and it's easy to convince yourself a location is right when really you just want it to be right. That's exactly the trap I'm describing at the start of this piece: falling for a street before you've actually tested it.
If you want a structured way to score a location against this thinking rather than relying on gut feel on the day, that's exactly what I built the retail location checklist and footfall calculator for.