JB Hi-Fi
Large Format
One Concept Across Four Hundred Points of Sale
For more than 25 years, Greater Group has served as design custodian for JB Hi-Fi, shaping and managing the evolution of its retail environment across Australia and New Zealand. Today, that relationship spans more than 150 stores and 250 telco kiosks, maintaining one recognisable retail identity across formats, locations and generations of the brand.
Dense Retail Is the Hard Kind to Systematise
JB Hi-Fi required its retail concept designed and managed across 150 stores and 250 telco kiosks in Australia and New Zealand. The scale is the brief. JB Hi-Fi trades on a deliberately dense, high-energy retail environment rather than a curated one, which is harder to systematise than a minimal concept, because the effect depends on volume, adjacency and signage working together rather than on a few controlled decisions.
The telco kiosks add a second problem. A kiosk inside a large-format store is a shop within a shop, with its own brand partners and its own service model, and 250 of them have to read as part of JB Hi-Fi while remaining legible as a distinct offer.
Concept Management, Not Just Concept Design
Greater Group held design and concept management, which is the more unusual half. A concept designed once and handed over drifts across 400 points of sale, because every store has different dimensions, every refit is done by a different contractor, and every trading pressure produces a local variation. Concept management is the discipline of keeping the concept intact across that estate over time: maintaining the standard, resolving the variations that genuinely need resolving, and refusing the ones that do not.
Four Hundred Points of Sale, Still One Concept
The result is JB Hi-Fi’s retail concept holding across 150 stores and 250 telco kiosks in Australia and New Zealand, kept intact as the estate refits and grows by concept management rather than by any single design decision.
“JB Hi-Fi have had a very close association with the greater group for over 25 years and during this time, their design and support team have contributed to a mutually successful period of growth for both organisations. In a demanding retail environment with increasingly complex design and statutory requirements and often under the added pressures of tight time frames, the team at the greater group are always able to respond to our fluctuating workload with an appropriate level of resources and creative skills. During our long association, the greater group have consistently delivered a professional and quality service. My colleagues & I regard the greater group team very highly and would have no hesitation in recommending them for any retail based projects in the future.”
