By Hannah Kuchler

Foreign tourists are fast becoming the primary customers for many of Britain’s outlet villages.

Some centres are even sending teams to emerging markets to lure wealthy tourists to plan trips that snub London’s Bond Street and opt for their discounted designer brands instead.

The number of Chinese consumers visiting Bicester Village in Oxfordshire has almost doubled in the past year, with tourists from China now making up more than a quarter of all shoppers at the village.

Value Retail, which runs Bicester and eight other outlet villages throughout Europe, has a team of 30 people who market the centres to foreign consumers. They visit the countries to give presentations to tourist companies and use social media to engage with shoppers directly.

Bicester even has its own blog written in Chinese where it uses competitions to entice Chinese bloggers to write for it.

“Bicester is more well known today in China than Selfridges or Harrods,” says Scott Malkin, chairman of Value Retail.

While it has not shunned the typical outlet village shopper – visits from British customers have risen during the recession – 60 per cent of customers now come from outside the UK.

“We’ll get advice that a Saudi princess is coming with 50 other women so we’ll create special accommodation for them ... bring in Arabic-speaking staff,” says Mr Malkin. “We get shockingly high-end international types.”

Tax-refunded sales, which are one way of tracking sales from outside the EU, increased 27 per cent in the West End last year, but rose 88 per cent at Bicester.

McArthur Glen runs seven outlets in the UK and has seen international customers rise, by 50 per cent in the past year, albeit from a lower base than at Bicester.

“Our teams on the ground noticed a shift in the number of tour buses, the Chinese became visible,” says Heinrik Madsen, managing director for McArthur Glen in northern Europe.

“Japanese tourists were a very big market for UK, as were US tourists, but they declined as the recession gripped. But the great economic growth in south-east Asia gave us a new-found affluent shopper.”

Mr Madsen believes that the fall of sterling has also helped attract shoppers.

Even though they are choosing to buy brands at a discount, foreign customers are not counting their pennies: the average spend per visit of an international visitor to Bicester is about £1,000 ($1,456) but its not unusual for them to spend more than £10,000.

Outlet village companies believe tourists are not embarrassed to buy discounted goods because of the importance of genuine brands when counterfeited products are rife at home.

Mr Malkin thinks Bicester beats Bond Street not only because of its prices but because it offers greater anonymity and the opportunity to visit Oxford or Warwick as part of a day out.

To accommodate the new visitors, retailers have started stocking smaller sizes and some are employing sales staff who speak foreign languages. Value Retail runs courses to teach store staff what Asian customers expect.

“The level of customer service has to be very precise because there’s the language barrier, the customers take a lot of time and want to see a lot of products,” says Jane Soper, store manager for Jimmy Choo.

Ms Soper believes word of mouth has been very powerful among shoppers from the Middle East, who particularly enjoy the bargain hunt. “The Middle Eastern customers like to haggle so I need to know what the prices are and how low I can go,” she says.

But brands with less of an overseas presence are still focusing on the more traditional customer.

Andrew Marshall, chief executive of Links of London, says its Bicester store does not particularly benefit from foreign customers.

“There is an element of passive brand-building but I think the person that’s visiting an outlet is there on a mission,” he says. “They’ve got these brands they know they’re going to go into and are almost blinkered to what else is available.”

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Source : www.ft.com, 15 may 2010