O2 UK Offer 4G and 5G Mobile Plans from Inside Clothing Stores
Mobile firm O2 (Telefonica UK) has today announced a curious new partnership with high street fashion chain NEXT, which will see the operator trial pop-up stores (Shop-in-Shop) in four of NEXT’s superstores across the country (Warrington Gemini, Southampton Hedge End, Swindon Orbital and Nottingham Giltbrook).
Apparently each “experimental” store will be approximately 650 sq. ft. in size, offering a range of products and services in line with those of traditional O2 stores. Assuming all goes well then O2 has expressed “ambitions to roll out more widely in the coming months.”
The first stores, in Warrington and Southampton, will open on Friday 25th October 2019, with stores in Swindon and Nottingham to follow in November 2019.
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Gareth Turpin, Sales Director at O2, said:
“We are delighted to be working with NEXT plc on the launch of our Shop-in-Shop trial. The current challenges facing the high street are never far from the headlines, but we are committed to driving innovation within our retail business by embracing flexibility.
By working with NEXT plc – one of the nation’s most recognisable retailers – customers will be able to browse and purchase O2 products and services alongside NEXT plc’s range of clothing and homeware. This, we believe, will make the retail experience even more convenient for customers.
We look forward to hearing their feedback on the trial and are excited to roll this out more widely in the coming months.”
The decision to mix mobile services and handsets with clothing and fashion is an odd one, although supermarkets like Tesco have arguably already taken a similar approach; but then you’d expect that from them. As ever the proof will be in the sales figures.
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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Oddly enough, this makes sense to me. The kind of people who are fans of the Next style are the kind of people who may have an affinity towards O2’s branding and the perks that go with some of their mobile plans.
Of course I have no substantive evidence to backup my claim. LOL.
A whole new meaning to backplane fabric?
It’s not as strange as one might think knowing the history of O2 & Next.
Although it’s now (everyone’s favourite) Capita who provide the customer service element for O2 you will find if you follow the trail backwards it was Next (indirectly) who had managed much of this service for decades before. There had always been a strong relationship between O2 (plus previous entitites) and Next.
I’ll keep it relatively short, but can go in to more detail if anyone is interested.
Next owned and controlled a seperate entity called Club 24. Club 24 (at least in the mid 90’s & 00’s traded as Ventura. Around 2011 Capita bought out Ventura and along with it the O2 service elements that Ventura provided.
Historically O2 existed as multiple different service providers all under the Cellnet / BT Cellnet brand. Club24 (and thus Next) were a service provider under the name Call Connections Ltd. If you ever purchased a phone from The Link, Phones4u, Barclaycard amongst others you were having the billing and customer service provided by Club 24.
Ventura provided customer services for other service providers such as Martin Dawes and its customers – usually businesses, and larger enterprises via Jupiter / ex. securicor accounts.