Retail spent a decade perfecting the transaction. This September in Barcelona, a 189-year-old catalog brand is betting the next decade will be won on presence. La Redoute is opening a new location measured not in sales, but in relationships.
Poelhekke is careful not to call it a store. It’s a place of commerce where selling is not the point. What he wants is something less immediate and more enduring: “If someone buys a sofa, great. But what I really want is that, the day they need one, they think of us. This is not a sales channel. It is a marketing channel. And here, revenue is not my focus.”
The shop is not dead. It has simply outgrown its old job.
For years, a shop had one job it was expected to do exceptionally well: sell. Digital does that now. Customers discover, compare and buy wherever it suits them. And as AI assistants reshape the journey, brands face a subtler danger: vanishing at the moment of purchase itself.
The store may be the last place a brand controls its own story from beginning to end. That rewrites its job description: less of a distribution channel, more of a stage for storytelling, community, education and inspiration. It becomes the place for everything performance marketing and algorithmic recommendation cannot say. The codes of such a place are, by now, a shared language: galleries, craft and the art of hosting. Barcelona is La Redoute’s experiment in exactly that direction.
From performance to presence
Poelhekke is candid about the shift. Like most retailers, La Redoute leaned hard on acquisition and performance marketing while digital growth was relatively inexpensive. “We used to do a lot of small things,” he says. “Now, far fewer. But if we do something, we do it very well.” Less endless acquisition. More events, design collaborations, creative communities and conversations.
Most brands call buying more customers “building the brand.” To Poelhekke, that is a bubble, not a brand, and he means to deflate it. The return is slower and harder to measure, he says. “Spending €50,000 or €100,000 with no immediate return isn’t easy. But that’s what creates long-term differentiation.”
That kind of investment takes conviction. It's not something dashboards can provide. Poelhekke knows because he has lived it. Before joining La Redoute, he built Made.com's Benelux business and opened its first showroom.
The Barcelona project reflects that same approach. It did not begin with a retail expansion plan. It began with an office lease. Rather than rent a standard workspace, Poelhekke leased a larger one that doubles as both an office and a public destination. Staff work there two or three days a week. The rest of the time it’s open to designers, customers, partners and hosts events. “I don’t have a budget to open a store,” he says. Instead, the showroom is a by-product of rent already paid. If it works, it is a blueprint for other cities.
