Holland & Barrett Is Designing for the Attention Economy, Not Just the Shopping Trip

Holland & Barrett is rethinking what a health and wellness store needs to achieve in a world where physical retail competes not only with other retailers, but with Netflix, sport, social media and every other demand on consumers' time. Speaking to The Retail Podcast at the ITAB Group Experience Center at EuroShop 2026 in Düsseldorf, Richard Fisher, Head of Store Design at Holland & Barrett, explained how concessions, experiential formats and a philosophy he calls "punk and showbiz" are helping the 150-year-old retailer evolve its physical estate.

For decades, retailers competed for a bigger share of the consumer's wallet.

Richard Fisher believes the battle has changed.

Retail is now competing for something considerably harder to win: attention.

The interview was recorded live from EuroShop 2026, which took place in Düsseldorf from 22 to 26 February 2026. Fisher had just come off stage from the ITAB Speakers Corner when he sat down with Alex Rezvan, Founder of The Retail Podcast.

His starting point was direct.

"We aren't really fighting for wallets anymore," Fisher said. "What we're actually spending is time and attention, and it's a really crowded marketplace."

He pointed to billion-dollar industries such as Netflix, Disney and the Premier League as examples of what physical retail is now competing against for a Saturday afternoon.

"When they weren't around, probably in the '80s, on a Saturday afternoon you just went to the shops," he said. "Now we're not competing for wallets, we're competing for attention."

Holland & Barrett at a Glance

Fisher briefly outlined the business for an international audience.

Holland & Barrett is a health and wellness retailer with approximately 800 stores in the UK, around 65 in the Republic of Ireland and 200 in Benelux, with further expansion into the Middle East. The company is around 150 years old and describes its mission as adding quality years to life through products and in-store advice.

"You don't get to hang around for 150 years if you aren't backed by science," Fisher said.

He noted that approximately 85% of people in the UK already know the Holland & Barrett name. The challenge now is converting that awareness into active wellness engagement.

Retail Is Competing With Everything That Can Hold Attention

The comparison with Netflix is deliberately provocative.

Holland & Barrett is not trying to turn health retail into entertainment.

Fisher's point is that the consumer's benchmark has changed.

Streaming platforms, sport, gaming, social media, restaurants, events and countless digital experiences are all competing for the same limited hours in the day.

Physical retail therefore has to justify the time required to visit it.

For store designers, this creates a different brief.

The question is no longer simply how to make a shop look better.

It becomes: why should someone notice it, enter it and spend time there at all?

Holland & Barrett Has Been Rebuilding Its Store Estate Around That Question

Holland & Barrett is not approaching the challenge from a standing start.

Fisher described a journey that began around five years ago with a well-regarded store in Chelmsford, followed by work to understand how those learnings could reach scale.

"If you do one good store, so what?" he said. "If you want to get brand reappraisal from old and dusty through a new modern retailer, you've got to get to 800 stores."

The company has since invested in its wider estate through what Fisher described as very surgical allocation of capital, both geographically and physically within individual stores.

That eventually led to a large store at Bluewater. Fisher described standing in the finished space alongside the CEO, property director and new chairman, feeling the anticipation of a new opening, and then feeling almost nothing.

"We'd done a good shop," he said, "but we're not acquiring new customers. Are we competing with Netflix?"

That question shaped everything that followed.

According to Holland & Barrett's own communications, the retailer invested approximately £70 million across stores, technology and new product development as part of its transformation strategy, refurbishing 315 stores in a single financial year.

Cardiff Became the Experiment in What a Wellness Store Could Be

That thinking eventually led to Holland & Barrett's first Experience Store in Cardiff, which opened in March 2025.

The Queen Street location introduced a more immersive interpretation of health and wellness retail, incorporating a wellbeing studio, health checks and blood testing through a partnership with Randox, and an H&B&Me pod. These details were confirmed by Holland & Barrett's press release at the time of the Cardiff opening, rather than discussed in the EuroShop interview itself.

What Fisher did discuss at EuroShop was the commercial impact.

"One in 6 people who pass that shop will go in there," he said. "We've got 49% of our customers are now 18 to 35."

That last figure is significant. It suggests the experience-led format is succeeding in its primary aim: acquiring customers who were not previously shopping at Holland & Barrett.

'Punk and Showbiz' Is Holland & Barrett's Answer to Attention

The phrase sounds unusual for a retailer with more than 150 years of history.

That is precisely the point.

For Fisher, punk is about interrupting expectations and getting attention. Showbiz is about making that attention commercially productive.

"The punk is getting somebody's attention," Fisher explained. "And the showbiz is it still needs to make money. It still needs to be a commercial entity. It still needs to be beautiful. And within that tension, I think you get great shops."

The tension between the two is what makes the philosophy useful.

Too much punk and the store risks becoming theatre that customers remember but do not buy from. Too much showbiz and the experience can become operationally efficient but invisible.

That is a much sharper definition of experiential retail than simply adding more screens, fixtures or activations.

Going Where the Customer Already Is

Holland & Barrett is also experimenting with a second response to the attention problem: rather than expecting every customer to make a dedicated trip to a standalone store, the brand is bringing Holland & Barrett into shopping journeys that already exist.

The company already operates around 80 concessions inside Tesco stores, a relationship it describes as an established partnership. It has since extended that model to single-aisle formats.

"We wanted to be able to start showing up in different ways for our customers," Fisher said. "The great thing about grocery is the cadence is a lot higher."

Fisher said Holland & Barrett is also now working with Morrisons, with early results described as "really, really positive." He noted that placing a Holland & Barrett proposition inside a grocery environment drives additional footfall for the host retailer while giving Holland & Barrett access to a broader and more frequent customer base.

The Same Brand Cannot Behave Exactly the Same in Every Context

That creates one of retail design's most difficult challenges.

Consistency matters. But identical execution does not always make sense.

Fisher described the grocery environment as requiring a fundamentally different approach because of what he called "the art of deselection."

"When you're in a grocer, it is the art of deselection," he said. "What can I not look away from or not pay attention to? There's so, so much."

A standalone Holland & Barrett store can create a richer environment around wellness. In a grocery aisle, the brand has seconds to communicate its proposition.

"Whilst in our standalone stores, we really turn the punk and showbiz on," Fisher said. "It's just a little bit more nuanced, a little bit more focused in a grocer."

The brand still needs to feel recognisably Holland & Barrett, but the expression must respond to a completely different shopping mission.

Sports Is Becoming Part of Holland & Barrett's Wellness Evolution

Holland & Barrett is also broadening what customers can expect to find inside its stores.

During the EuroShop conversation, Rezvan referenced the retailer's Oxford Street presence, where a full floor had been given over to sport.

Fisher described that format as another learning environment rather than a finished template.

"With all these things, some things work, some things don't, but we'll always learn and we'll always evolve," he said. Learnings from Oxford Street around range, layout and messaging fed directly into the Cardiff store.

He summarised the principle directly: "In retail there are very, very few hard and fast rules, and I think one of those hard and fast rules is evolve or die."

The Store May Need a Different P&L in the Future

Perhaps the most strategically important part of Fisher's argument concerns how retailers measure stores.

Most physical locations are still evaluated as individual commercial units, with their own profit and loss.

Fisher suggested that model may become incomplete as stores increasingly influence purchases that ultimately happen online.

He referenced a story told by a Gymshark executive about tracking physical events and observing a subsequent wave of online orders from people who had engaged with the brand in person, gone home, and then purchased.

"I think a lot of the big things we will probably see over the next period of time is also a rethinking of how we finance stores," Fisher said. "People go in, learn about the brand, learn about the products. Maybe not buy there. Go home, sit on the sofa and go, 'Maybe I will buy that.'"

He described this as stores becoming an extension of marketing rather than purely a point of sale.

This is RetailNews.ai's analysis, drawing on Fisher's argument: if a physical location is judged only by transactions completed inside its four walls, retailers may systematically undervalue stores that play an important role in omnichannel customer acquisition.

Brand Consistency May Become More Important as Formats Multiply

When asked which retailers he admires from a design perspective, Fisher returned to a simple idea: clarity.

He highlighted The Ordinary as an example of a brand whose identity remains entirely consistent across products and physical environments. He also mentioned Agent Provocateur as another retailer that achieves singular brand consistency across every touchpoint.

"I think the brands that do it the best have the clearest consistency of their brand message," Fisher said. "Every touch point is consistent within the brand. I think it's so, so powerful as a piece of design and consideration."

That becomes increasingly important as retail formats fragment across standalone stores, flagships, concessions, single aisles, travel locations and experience formats.

The challenge is not making every environment identical. It is ensuring that each one unmistakably belongs to the same brand.

The Future Store Has to Earn Its Place in the Day

Fisher's attention-economy argument ultimately reframes the physical retail debate.

The question is no longer whether stores will survive e-commerce.

The harder question is: which stores deserve the customer's time?

A functional warehouse of products can be reproduced online. A generic assortment can be searched from a phone. Price can be compared instantly. Convenience can often be delivered to the door.

Physical retail therefore needs to contribute something that makes leaving home worthwhile.

For Holland & Barrett, that is driving experimentation across wellness services, store design, concessions, new categories and more immersive formats.

But the strategy is not experience for experience's sake.

That is where Fisher's "punk and showbiz" idea becomes most useful.

Punk earns the attention. Showbiz turns it into a viable retail business.

The challenge for every physical retailer is finding its own version of that equation.

Because the store is no longer competing only with the shop next door.

It is competing with everything else the customer could do instead.