Expansion
The company expanded in the 1970s and 1980s including the opening of stores in the newly-developing wave of indoor shopping malls (such as The Mall Bexleyheath and Lakeside Shopping Centre). 1977 saw the firm launch a joint venture with supermarket retailer Sainsbury's to create hypermarkets using the SavaCentre brand. Sainsbury's took whole control of SavaCentre in 1989 and has more recently converted the stores to the Sainsbury's branding.
A downturn in business in the early 1980s was fought with a revamp of the stores and the selling of goods with higher profit margins. The company closed its only overseas store, in Dublin, Ireland, during this time. In 1985 the first overseas franchise store opened in Gibraltar. Such stores, not directly owned by the BHS company itself, now operate over Europe and the Middle East. In 1986, BHS merged with Habitat and Mothercare to form Storehouse plc and soon afterwards, the British Home Stores registered company name and branding across its shops was replaced with 'BhS' (later Bhs, and since reverted to the all-caps BHS, which the company used in addition to the full British Home Stores name prior to the full rebrand) and a new corporate logo. The exception was in stores that displayed a 'historic' fascia, such as Edinburgh's Princes Street, which continued to feature the British Home Stores name in its original Roman type etched into the granite shop front.
British Home Stores, like many other major retailers, has followed a trend of opening stores at out-of-town locations since the 1980s. A notable example is the two-level store at Merry Hill Shopping Centre in the West Midlands (which formed part of an Enterprise Zone). This store opened on 14 November 1989. It ultimately replaced the store in nearby Dudley, which closed in June 1990 as a result of a sharp fall in trade since the opening of the Merry Hill store. The nearby West Bromwich store also closed around the same time, its fortunes affected by the Merry Hill development as well as smaller developments around nearby Oldbury which started with the SavaCentre hypermarket in 1980.
Read more about this topic: British Home Stores, History
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