Visit to H&M Flagship Store

Yesterday evening, I visited the H&M flagship store at Orchard Building which was fitted out by Kingsmen after two previous futile attempts to enter it. The main reason why I wanted to go down was to take a look at the quality of work done by Kingsmen. Another reason obviously was to shop around for fashionable clothes.

I wanted to go down with my friend on grand opening day on 3rd September but it was mad-packed and who wouldn’t have guessed it, right? On the second attempt, exactly a week later, the queue outside the store was not as long but it was still long that we forwent queuing up. It was my lucky break yesterday. There was a queue but the queue was moving very fast and my friend and I queued for less than one minute. You can see a short queue to the left of the picture below.

A shot of the inside from the outside:

Once we entered, the store was quite crowded and there wasn’t much room to move around. The whole design and layout of the store was spartan yet elegant. There are a total of three floors. Ladies wear covers the first two floors and men’s wear and kids wear occupy the third floor. The clothing shelves were packed close together, probably to maximize the floor area. Below are pictures of the first floor, the ladies section, from the escalator:

Next, pictures of the men’s section. In the second picture below right in the middle, you can see the cashier queue snaking. H&M’s cash register must be ringing none stop from the fashion-crazy crowd and the never-ending queues. There was a queue even for the fitting room, as seen from the third snapshot below.

Lastly, a shot of a design near the escalators with a very nice caption on it:

From the queues from the first day till now and with all the hype, H&M’s decision to open their first store of Southeast Asia in Singapore has proven to be an excellent decision. This bodes well for Kingsmen as H&M may engage it again for other stores around the region and the world. I’m looking forward to visiting the Abercrombie & Fitch outlet when it opens towards the end of 2011.