For decades, pharmacies have occupied a largely transactional role in retail. Customers entered with a prescription to fill or a product already in mind to purchase, then quickly moved on. But changing consumer expectations, growing competition from e-commerce, and the increasing convergence of retail and healthcare are reshaping that model.
Rufus Turnbull, founder and creative director of Hong Kong-headquartered Studio X, says wellness retailers increasingly need to offer customers a reason to visit beyond simply buying products.
That shift was central to the design of Mannings’ 3200sqft flagship at Hong Kong’s IFC shopping centre, completed by Studio X in 2024 as a pilot store and testing ground for the chain’s future retail strategy across Asia. The project, developed for parent company DFI Retail Group, was conceived as a beta environment where new ideas could be trialled, measured and refined before being adapted for wider rollout. Studio X not just designed the IFC flagship, but helped translate the concept into a scalable retail framework for wider adaptation.
At its core was a move away from transaction-driven retail towards a more consultative, service-led model.
“Stores increasingly need to give customers a reason to visit beyond simply completing a transaction,” Turnbull explains. “As products become more commoditised and e-commerce continues to compete on convenience and price, physical retail needs to create value through expertise, reassurance, discovery and experience.
“Obviously, you need a reason to go to a shop, and shopping malls have critical mass, so once you get a shopping mall, you might tend to go and pick up some paracetamol, but that’s not enough for the retailer to pay rent when you’re competing against an Apple store when the lease renewal comes up,” Turnbull continues.
“The consultative trend is an important way for retailers to differentiate themselves from transactional, margin-driven retailers in brick-and-mortar retail and online: If you are buying a commoditised product, why do you need to go to a store? Where’s the value? Why not just buy it online? Prescriptions, obviously, are different, as regulated products. But if you just want to buy some vitamin C, you can go to whichever e-commerce platform is the cheapest and offers it in the most friction-free way possible.”
For pharmacy retailers, that creates both a challenge and an opportunity. While many health and wellness products have become highly commoditised, pharmacies retain a unique position of trust with consumers. They are among the healthcare professionals that consumers interact with most frequently, creating opportunities to build deeper relationships through advice, reassurance and services.
“The advantage that someone like Manning’s has is that they’re able to build authority in providing advice to customers, and then have the opportunity to tie that into the more commoditised elements of retail,” Turnbull says.
“If you can get health-check advice, a curated supplement stack, and pick up your regular prescriptions, then you are starting to build a sort of critical mass. At that point, the service becomes quite compelling, taking you out of that highly commoditised, highly transactional environment and into something with a different kind of value. That is where we have taken this store – from transactional to consultative.”
The flagship incorporated a range of healthcare services designed to strengthen that proposition. Medical professionals can conduct procedures and tests that do not require a doctor’s visit, including vaccinations, temperature checks and medical certificates. The broader objective was to create a composite offer in which services and retail purchases reinforce one another.
“The business knows that when people come in for consultation, they are likely to buy stuff as well, which changes the commercial dynamic,” Turnbull explains.
Technology also played a role in supporting customer engagement, but Studio X approached digital integration cautiously. Rather than introducing technology for its own sake, every intervention was required to serve a clear customer purpose.
“We are always trying to be really careful about how we use technology. I remember when touch screens came out and designers, retailers, everyone in the ecosystem, were desperate to find a way to shoehorn touch screens into store designs,” he says.
“I was always conscious about being purpose-driven. What’s the reason to put in a touchscreen, other than it is the latest bit of gadgetry?”
Turnbull recalls seeing similar enthusiasm surrounding QR codes.
“I literally saw one retailer try to use QR codes as a floor tile pattern, expecting customers to scan them on the floor. They were trying to wedge this stuff in without going through the kind of rigour that you should be going through to work out whether it was valuable or not.”
That philosophy informed the development of digital features within the Mannings flagship, including AI-enabled health services and near field communication (NFC) “lift-and-learn” technology that allows customers to access information simply by picking up a product.
“A lot of the technology that we introduced had to meet certain criteria: We did not want anything that you would have to explain to a customer; it should be completely intuitive, and it should add value to the transaction. It should earn its place in a store.”
The lift-and-learn functionality was designed to support customers who prefer to browse independently before seeking assistance. It provides product information and benefits instantly, creating what Turnbull describes as “a nice way to bridge the gap between you and your customer type who wants to browse, but does not necessarily want to engage with a member of staff just yet”.
For Studio X, the Mannings project was fundamentally strategy-led rather than design-led. Turnbull argues that retailers often focus too heavily on visual expression, colours and aesthetics before defining the commercial purpose of a space.
“Often, retail designers are tempted to focus on a design concept in terms of colour palettes, and what he describes as ‘feelings being design languages’,” he says.
“I am not diminishing the importance of those things; they’re important, but our belief is that they are a subset of the overall customer brand positioning and commercial purpose of space. You’ve got to define your purpose succinctly first.”
“If you don’t have a purpose,” he adds, “you are unable to develop insights and, therefore, meaningful concepts that will actually result in something appealing and of value to consumers.”
That thinking shaped every aspect of the Mannings flagship.
“The easy bit was developing the flagship, coming up with all the bells and whistles,” Turnbull says. “Then we had to distil that down into five or six different formats that they could develop and implement across their network, and gradually roll out.”
For wellness retailers facing growing competition from online channels, the lessons extend beyond pharmacy. The future of physical retail may depend less on the products being sold and more on the services, expertise and reassurance that customers cannot easily access elsewhere, especially online.
The objective is to move beyond decoration and transactions, and create environments with a clearly defined purpose.
“Design is most effective when it is rooted in a clear customer, operational and commercial objective, rather than being treated as a decorative end in itself,” concludes Turnbull.
