“Significantly added to the outstanding success”
“It is a real testimony to James Logie and the team at Retail Management Consultants, that they successfully recruited the most highly skilled and competent senior management team for Bluewater, which upon opening broke new ground as the largest retail destination in Europe and, in sales, captured 3% of the entire UK retail spend.
The work completed by James and his team significantly added to the outstanding success of this massive retail undertaking by Lend Lease.”
Adrian Wright
Managing Director
Bluewater ↗
Europe's largest retail & leisure complex
Lend Lease is a leading international property and infrastructure group with operations in Australia, Asia, Europe and the Americas. As an integrated construction & development company, they are able to take a holistic approach to delivering destinations from scratch, harnessing expertise in infrastructure, design, development, investments and management to deliver projects from conception to completion.
In 1994, Lend Lease identified an unprepossessing brownfield site - a disused chalk quarry located near Dartford, Kent - and with vision and determination they transformed it into Bluewater, Europe's largest retail and leisure complex. Opened in 1999, Bluewater is set in 240 acres centre and offers over 330 stores, over 50 bars, restaurants and cafes along with 13,000 free car parking spaces attracting 27 million visitors per annum.
Big isn't necessarily always beautiful, and Lend Lease were not content to just launch yet another mainstream super-regional mall - instead they set out a course to no less than change the shopping centre industry. From its striking architecture to its then unique concierge team, Bluewater unquestionably elevated the UK shopping experience to a whole new level, challenging retail tenants to bring their "A-game" and setting extraordinary new levels of retail excellence and customer experience.
RMC were approached by Lend Lease to help recruit the senior leader team responsible for delivering this ground-breaking new retail theatre. Our initial challenge was to think beyond conventional shopping centre hires, and to focus instead upon identifying the very best talent from dynamic and customer-facing sectors such as entertainment, retailing and hospitality.
We conducted an exhaustive talent-mapping exercise and drew up our initial shortlist. Our second challenge was then to identify those individuals capable of embracing Bluewater's Disneyland-style "Magic Kingdom" guest service philosophy - truly putting the customer at the heart of every business decision. We conducted a series of structured interviews which included role-playing and extensive psychometric profiling, and successfully recruited the senior team.
Since Bluewater opened its doors on March 16, 1999, it has set the benchmark for the ultimate shopping and leisure experience and the rest, as they say, is retail history…