The Aldi Local concept is designed for busy city centre customers shopping frequently and on foot for small quantities of convenience items. The concept needed to follow the design direction of larger Aldi UK stores, also designed by our team, ensuring that the company’s core values and messaging around product quality, product freshness and low price were consistently applied in the shift to a smaller format.
Our team created an evolution of the existing city store concept, working within Aldi’s brand guidelines and using the smaller footprint of the Balham store as our test bed. The ‘Aldi Local’, the first of its kind, is 6,000 sq. ft., half the size of a regular Aldi and stocks a reduced product range with a focus on more grab and go items. We enhanced these offerings with clean, bold graphics and additional signage.
The central “Special Buys” aisle, a trademark Aldi differentiator, typically features bulkier items designed to be taken home by car. We know that Aldi’s competitively priced special buys are regarded with a degree of humour and affection by customers and can result in spontaneous, unplanned purchases, so we introduced messaging to remind customers that these products are available to order online even if they cannot be accommodated in the smaller store format.
For the first time, self-checkout tills are being rolled out across the Aldi Local estate in a number of major cities. We developed a customer journey and messaging to help customers to use these new facilities.
Our ongoing working relationship with Aldi is testament to the quality of our design and won the FAB 2019 award for Retail Store Environment in the Business Effectiveness category.