Project Awarded: Hollister Boulevard

McCue appointed to deliver Hollister's second Northern Ireland store

McCue has been appointed to deliver the fit-out of the Hollister Co. new store at The Boulevard, Banbridge — the US fashion brand's second site in Northern Ireland.

Hollister, part of the Abercrombie & Fitch group, has been trading in Northern Ireland from Victoria Square in Belfast. The Banbridge store takes the brand out of the city centre and into one of the region's busiest out-of-town destinations.

McCue will carry out the fit-out, working to Hollister's global store standard.

Working to a global standard

Fit-out for an international fashion brand leaves little room for interpretation.

Timber finishes, lighting levels, fixture spacing and material specifications are set centrally and signed off centrally. A store in Banbridge has to read the same as a store in Berlin or Boston, and the approvals process runs through the brand's own team rather than stopping locally.

The work is to hit that standard exactly, inside a unit that was never designed around it. Existing services, floor levels and structural constraints all have to be resolved without any visible compromise to the brand environment.

Delivering in a live retail environment

The Boulevard trades throughout the fit-out period, and that shapes the delivery plan.

Deliveries are sequenced around trading hours and shared service access. Noise and dust are controlled to protect neighbouring tenants and shoppers. Hoarding and site access arrangements have to keep a working construction site separate from an operating retail centre.

Our approach on projects like this is to manufacture as much as possible in our own workshop and deliver straight to installation. It keeps site time down, keeps quality under our control, and reduces the disruption a live centre has to absorb.

Why retail fit-out is judged differently

Retailers don't judge a fit-out on the build alone. They judge it on the opening date, on the snag list, and on whether the store looks the way it does in every other territory.

An opening date in retail is fixed well in advance, tied to stock, recruitment and marketing that are all committed before anyone sets foot on site. Programme certainty isn't a nice-to-have on these projects. It's the whole job.

If you are working on a retail park or city centre scheme and need certainty on quality and programme, talk to our team.