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retail expansion
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United Kingdom
Retail expansion data for UK store chains
Build your UK retail expansion strategy on footfall, catchment, competitor and spend data for any high street, shopping centre or retail park.
Get a free analysis of your locations
Up to 5 locations. No cost, no commitment.
We handle your details in line with UK GDPR.
Huq supports retail expansion for UK chains deciding where their next stores should go. Compare footfall at candidate sites on high streets, in shopping centres and on retail parks with your best stores. Check catchment overlap with your current estate, see which competitors trade nearby, and use Huq's White Space Analysis tool to look for towns where you have no presence yet.
See how Huq supports retail expansion
The video tours the Huq platform as a whole. With an expansion list in hand, watch how the Explore map lets you test any town centre or retail park, how the catchment and travel-time layers show how far shoppers travel, and how Projects lets your property team track candidate sites through to sign-off.
- Testing a high street or retail park site on the Explore map
- Comparing catchments of candidate and existing stores
- Tracking a site pipeline in Projects
Trusted by 300+ organisations · Data across 35 markets
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What is a retail expansion strategy?
A retail expansion strategy sets out how a chain grows its store estate: which towns to enter, how many stores each can support, which formats to use and in what order. It is a multi-site plan, not a way to grow sales in one shop.
In the UK, the choices are wide. A brand might weigh a high street unit against a retail park, or a regional shopping centre against a smaller town centre. Each option has a different catchment and a different mix of competitors, and a poor choice can take sales from a store you already run.
Huq gives property and expansion teams comparable evidence at any address: footfall, catchments, competitor presence, cross-visitation and geo-spend data via Experian, refreshed weekly. JD Sports, a UK retailer, used Huq to get 25% more precise catchment analysis and 18% lower new-store location risk.
What's in your UK retail expansion analysis
01
Gaps in your estate
Use the White Space Analysis tool with footfall, brand and postcode layers to look for towns you don't serve.
02
Overlap with your estate
Measure catchment overlap and shared visitors between a candidate site and existing stores.
03
Competitor presence
Map competitor brand locations around each candidate and compare their footfall.
04
Footfall and spend
Weekly footfall, visiting vs passing traffic and geo-spend by category at every shortlisted site.
What a UK retail expansion analysis shows
Three views UK expansion teams use to make the case for a new store.
01
Towns where you're missing
Footfall and brand-location layers, used with the White Space Analysis tool, help you spot busy towns and retail centres with no store of yours nearby.
02
Cannibalisation risk
Cross-visitation for up to 10 location pairs shows how many shoppers a candidate shares with your existing stores.
03
Pipeline in Projects
Every candidate site in one folder, with status tracking and monthly PDF reports for the investment committee.
Retail expansion data across the UK
Huq covers any address in the UK: high streets, shopping centres, retail parks, competitors' stores and sites you haven't opened yet. No counters, sensors or cameras needed.
Huq manually validates more than 1,000 locations in each of its 35 markets twice a year, and data refreshes weekly.
How it works
Step 1
Tell us your locations
Add up to five addresses in the form. Your own stores, candidate sites or competitors.
Step 2
We run the analysis
Our team maps each location from observed visitor data.
Step 3
We walk you through it
A short call to take you through what the data shows and what it means for you.
Why UK chains use Huq for retail expansion
- Huq publishes its accuracy by country: an 18.7% median error in Great Britain against landlord-reported footfall.
- JD Sports, a UK retailer, got 25% more precise catchment analysis and 18% lower new-store location risk.
- Ripon BID saw footfall up 164% year on year.
- Trusted by 300+ organisations across 35 markets, including the global insights, research and location intelligence teams at Nike, Adidas, JD Sports and Samsung.
huq's platform gave us valuable data to support a key decision on potential new sites.
Dan Brogden
National Sales Manager, Puccinos
Who it's for
01
Retail chains of any size
From five-store retailers planning their next site to global brands: choose locations, track store performance and benchmark against competitors.
02
Retail property owners
Show centre performance, support leasing and get the tenant mix right, for landlords, asset managers and brokers.
03
Investors and private equity
Check how retail brands and assets actually perform before you buy, and monitor them after.
Everything Huq measures, in one platform
- Footfall: by week, month and year, with totals, average daily footfall, trends, period-on-period change, and visiting vs passing traffic.
- Residents and visitors.
- Catchment and travel time: catchment by postcodes, plus drive-time and travel-time analysis.
- Demographics and profiling: age, gender and purchasing power.
- Behaviour: visit frequency, dwell time, time of day and dayparts, cross-visitation between up to 10 location pairs, and international visitation for tourism.
- Footfall density and transportation mode.
- Places, brands and industries: points of interest, brand locations and brand analysis, industry performance, shopping centre and retail centre types.
- Geo-spend: spend by volume and category at any UK location, via Experian.
- Tools: the Explore map (draw any area or use layers for travel time, catchment, shopping centres, retail centres, brand locations, industries and postcodes), White Space Analysis, and Projects for monitoring many locations and reporting to stakeholders.
- Delivery: the platform, CSV or Excel exports, monthly PDF location reports, and data feeds as Parquet and CSV files into Amazon S3 or Google Cloud Storage buckets.
- Cadence: data refreshes weekly.
Frequently asked questions
What is a retail expansion strategy?
A retail expansion strategy is a chain's plan for growing its store estate: which towns and formats to target, how many stores to open, in what order, and how to protect existing stores. Good strategies rest on comparable data for every candidate site.
How do retailers decide where to open new stores in the UK?
Most compare candidate sites with their best-performing stores on footfall, catchment, competitors and local spend. Huq lets you do this at any UK address, including high streets, shopping centres and retail parks, without installing counters.
Can I get a free retail expansion analysis?
Yes. Share a few existing stores and the sites or towns on your list. Huq will prepare a free analysis comparing footfall, catchments and nearby competitors. As Puccinos' National Sales Manager put it, Huq's platform "gave us valuable data to support a key decision on potential new sites."
Does Huq cover the whole UK?
Huq covers any address in the UK: high streets, town centres, shopping centres, retail parks and competitors' stores. Huq validates more than 1,000 locations in each of its 35 markets twice a year.
How often is the footfall data updated?
Huq data refreshes weekly. You can view footfall by week, month or year, so you can compare seasonal patterns at candidate sites, such as Christmas trading or summer peaks in coastal towns, before setting an opening date.
How accurate is Huq's footfall data in the UK?
Huq publishes its accuracy by country as median error against landlord-reported footfall. In Great Britain it is an 18.7% median error, well under the 30% healthy threshold. Full sample sizes are in Huq's downloadable validation report.
Questions? Talk to us
Book a demoAbout Huq
Huq is a location intelligence company. We turn anonymised mobile location data into footfall, catchment and visitor insight for any place, so retailers, property owners and local authorities can make decisions on evidence.
See how your locations really perform
Up to 5 locations. No cost, no commitment.