Stacking the decks at H&M

A volcano, a pirate ship, the New York skyline, and the Eiffel Tower are visible from where I'm bouncing up and down excitedly. Yes, the Rapide team went to  Vegas, and yours truly has been chosen to blog about it!

It's a company team-building trip, and they invited me and my brother Rant along - as well as other hangers-on, like that marketing guy that hangs around but nobody knows what he does.

Well, there are countless retail opportunities in Sin City, and I've got a bit of a confession to make...

... yes, in the midst of the world's greatest fashion boutiques... Dior and Givenchy and Chanel and a host of others... I'm spending the morning shopping in H&M!

Well, since I work for a technology company (Rapide) I suppose I should start by saying they have an excellent URL: hm.com. (How difficult would it be to secure a two-letter URL these days?) But I like H&M for another reason altogether: the "touchability" of everything. So I looked up the nearest store to our hotel, The Mirage, then bounced up to the Miracle Mile Mall that wraps around Planet Hollywood like a nice retail-stuffed doughnut.

Now, some stores do men's stuff, but H&M is really a girl's shop, isn't it. Lots of rails to shuffle through, piles of things to explore, and all the accessories to go with them ... and the prices in the USA are just as good, if not better, than back home in Britain.

And it's nice and BIG! I could easily buy their summer dresses by the armload, if I had arms. (And if I wore dresses.) The selection is HUGE. Almost too big, in fact. And that's what brings me to the bit I wanted to talk about: their website, in particular their Style Guide.

After all, there's only so far you can go with thinking "Oooh, that's nice" and just buying it. (However good that feels.) And sorting through every single rail isn't very nice to the people who have to tidy it up - it leaves the shop looking, as one of the Rapiders commented, "like a jumble sale!" by about 3pm each day.

So you need to be able to piece together a "look" that'll make heads swivel in the street. And the Style Guide gives you all the ideas to sort through, so you can make a list before you go out. (Shopping is hard work after all, isn't it! Even though all the boys think we're out having fun.)

I use the Style Guide most times I want to shop, and it works just as well for the US stores as the UK ones. The look I was going for was "zany" - there's a reason for that, but that's for another blog - and I came back from the mall with so much stuff the 747's going to groan on the flight back!

So that's why I like this place so much: the two halves work really well together, not all disjointed like many other retail sites. Lots of retailers worry about "cannibalising customers" if they split their efforts into real-world and virtual-world stores; H&M doesn't, it sees them as working together. They get the detail right, too: the site has enough content to give you loads of ideas; the stores have enough stock to "answer" them. I found everything on my (rather long) list today. And very few companies pull that off.

That's why I love H&M!