The spirit of ETH: sustainable and attractive
The ETH Store is adopting an increasingly targeted approach to the needs of its customers with a fresh range of products and services. Its newly streamlined organisation also ensures greater responsiveness.
"Our products are designed to appeal to everyone on the ETH campus – students, ETH staff, alumni and visitors," says Katrin Schley, managing director of ETH Store AG. The retailer currently has five sales outlets at ETH and on the Toni campus of the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK), all offering a wide range of stationery goods and books as well as merchandising at comparatively low prices.
To ensure that this can continue going forward, the ETH Store's backers – the cooperative and the public company – have merged this year to create a lean, flexible organisation. One of the reasons is that the Store has branched out: alongside stationery articles, books and model building materials, it now increasingly caters to personal needs.
Help with everyday campus life
This includes services that might come as a surprise. For instance, a mini survey revealed that there was a demand for a laundry service, especially on the Hönggerberg campus. "We've now started offering this in collaboration with specialists Cleaning Store," says Katrin Schley.
Another offering arose from the fact that users of sports facilities in the university area sometimes forget their toiletries at home, including the indispensable towel: the Store's outlets now stock the relevant items at a value-for-money price point. And there's another new service: the outlets offer a photocopying service that requires no ETH card. This satisfies a demand in particular from visitors and occasional campus users.
ETH at heart
The ETH Store stocks certain products on an exclusive basis, such as items that visibly convey the spirit of the university to the outside world by bearing the official "ETH Zurich" name. These mainly include the ever-popular T-shirts, hoodies and sweatshirts. The range of items, designs and colours is correspondingly broad: "We've acquired a great deal of merchandising know-how and supply channels over the past few years," says Katrin Schley. "We also have a feel for what works as a carrier for the ETH brand. The ETH Store is able to develop new and attractive merchandising articles relatively quickly." Institutes, units and university groups interested in ordering items for congresses and so forth – or in having new ones created – are well catered for by the ETH Store.
Reward for good ideas
Exclusive to the Store are the new recycled carrier bags; each one is unique. The material consists of the durable plastic of the two by five-metre advertising and information banners that regularly hang above the entrance of the main ETH building – a sustainable and original use of the material, which would otherwise have to be disposed of as waste.
ETH store welcomes other ideas for products: any suggestion that makes it to the store's shelves is rewarded with a CHF 100 voucher.