I was in Brussels last week with two other retailers, looking at good local indie retail. One shop on my list was Cook & Book from when I was planning last year was a cool bookshop playing in the food and book spaces, a famous complex in Woluwe-Saint-Lambert that fused bookshops and dining across themed rooms, one of them with a car hanging from the ceiling. People travelled to see it. Reviewers called it heaven.
We did not get there. It went broke.
Cook & Book was declared bankrupt in June last year, after almost twenty years of trading. Thirty or so people lost their jobs. The business had been weakened by Covid, then inflation and rising costs, and was in a judicial reorganisation, Belgium’s version of administration, hoping for a buyer. One serious candidate emerged, a former CEO of Delhaize Belgium no less, and withdrew at the last minute because he could not reach agreement with the landlord on lease terms. The landlord, the local municipality, was itself owed more than 500,000 euros. It got its building back. It did not get its money.
I think about Cook & Book because it overfed what the experience retail cheer squad champions: Destination. Theatre. Instagrammable. A reason to visit that a screen cannot replace. All true, and I say versions of it on this blog myself.
And it still went broke.
Cook & Book had the traffic and the affection. What it apparently did not have, for years, was numbers that worked. Theatre brings people in. It does not lower the rent, shrink the wage bill or lift the margin on a book. A spectacular format with restaurant overheads and bookshop margins is a hard equation on a good day. Add a pandemic and an inflation spike and it stops being an equation at all.
The lesson is not that experience retail is wrong. It is that experience is a traffic strategy, not a margin strategy. You still need product that pays for the floor it sits on. The theatre is the invitation. The basket pays the bills.
Cook & Book dies at the lease from what I read.
Rent arrears of half a million euros. A rescue that collapsed because buyer and landlord could not agree terms. Fourteen hundred square metres of fixed cost that no amount of charm could shrink. When the end came, the landlord held every card.
I wrote recently about online sales giving a retailer an off ramp when a lease turns bad. Cook & Book is the other side of that coin: a destination business with one huge site, one landlord, and no way out. However magical the shop, the person you sign a lease with holds more of your future than any customer does.
For every Australian retailer being told to add experience, and it is good advice as far as it goes, the questions underneath do not change. What is the gross profit per square metre of the theatre? What happens to the model if traffic drops 20 per cent for two years? How exposed am I to one landlord, and what is my off ramp?
Cook & Book could not answer those questions well enough, and it was one of the most loved shops in Europe.
Being loved gets you customers, press and a queue for the waffles next door. It does not get you out of retail’s oldest maths. Nothing does.