Bookshop Spotlight: Thalia Hamburg
Taking its place in Hamburg’s prestigious new shopping mall, Westfield Hamburg-Überseequartier, is Germany’s largest book chain Thalia, with a new flagship store.
Überseequartier, New-Orleans-Straße 6, 20457 Hamburg, Germany
It took 12 months longer than anticipated, with building costs nearly doubling to €2.5bn, but Hamburg’s prestigious new shopping mall, Westfield Hamburg-Überseequartier, has finally opened. Among the anchor tenants is Germany’s largest book chain Thalia, with a new flagship store that merits a closer look.
Flanked by popular eatery Galactic Bread, a Lego Store and a huge ZARA branch, Thalia occupies a prime corner location overlooking the river Elbe and the new cruise terminal. When Thalia CEO Ingo Kretzschmar secured the two floors of approximately 1,700 sq metres for the bookstore in March 2023, he also announced that layout and optics would differ vastly from Thalia’s usual shop-fitting concept.
And they do indeed. The new store has been tailor-made for the location in close collaboration between Thalia’s store-design unit and the Dutch retail design studio NOMNOM. The concept’s implementation was overseen by the book chain’s own building department. Johannes Brancke, Thalia’s sales director, calls the store “a very special project”, combining local identity deeply steeped in seafaring traditions and innovative shop design. “The location in the heart of HafenCity is ideal to showcase our vision of modern bookselling.”
The location in the heart of HafenCity is ideal to showcase our vision of modern bookselling.
In reference to the city of Hamburg, the store emphasises the maritime flair of the vibrant metropolis in northern Germany, which has a population of more than 1.9 million. The city is Germany’s largest port and a major international trading hub with centuries-old ties to the sea. It is connected to the North Sea by the river Elbe.
Red bricks have been used, which are typical for northern Germany, and metal wall coverings depicting large containers catch the eye, as well as wood parquet flooring and movable wooden elements evoking memories of the old chests used to transport tea and coffee. The main colour scheme is copper red, reminiscent of the rooftops of Hamburg’s Speicherstadt, the historic storehouses in the harbour area.
Customers who enter the store via the main entrance are greeted by approximately five metres of shelf space reserved for a huge number of gifts associated with Hamburg – and a vast collection with a regional connection, ranging from travel guides, illustrated books, history titles and novels set in and around the city, to works by local authors.
Kids have their own sea-inspired world. Much in demand are the reading places with a view of the river and shaped like large portholes – and, of course, the eye-catching ceiling-high octopus in bright yellow. It is the main attraction in the large children’s book department situated on the first floor, specially designed for the location with its eight tentacles hiding a slide.
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Overall, Thalia Westfield offers a full range of approximately 130,000 different titles. Fiction and YA titles dominate the ground floor together with guidebooks, a wide array of non-book, including toys, and a large section for international books on 20 metres of shelves, mostly English-language titles with a growing selection of non-fiction due to customer demand. Among the staff in this section are several native speakers.
The first floor is home to children’s books as well as non-fiction and academic titles, travel, lifestyle, educational books and games. The in-store Buch & Bohne coffee shop is a huge customer magnet. Its seating area has comfy chairs and spectacular views over the river and harbour and is nearly always very busy. Thalia employs a staff of 35 – five managing the coffee shop and a team of 30 booksellers for the store, including four apprentices.
Customer service is a top priority with digitalisation at the forefront, including eight self-service check-out stations and contactless payment with Thalia’s app or bank card. The number of self-service check-out stations is expected to rise gradually, not only at the main cash desks but also in popular sections, to facilitate payment processes in peak times such as the Christmas period.
A click-and-collect station outside the side entrance, which can be accessed 24 hours a day, seven days a week, has quickly become a hit with customers. When ordering online, customers can choose to pick up the order during regular opening hours (10am to 8pm, Monday to Saturday), have it sent to a destination of their choice or pick it up from the click-and-collect station, which is accessed by a QR code. The station is filled daily and the available boxes come in different sizes to accommodate bulky orders such as games.
Westfield Hamburg-Überseequartier is among the most ambitious retail and lifestyle projects ever realised in Germany. It is at the heart of Hamburg’s new urban quarter HafenCity, itself one of Europe’s largest inner-city developments based on sustainable guidelines.
The huge riverside complex Überseequartier is an ensemble of 13 interconnected buildings for living (580 flats), working (more than 8,000 business spaces), leisure, dining and shopping on 420,000 sq metres. It also includes three hotels with a total of 810 rooms and has its own cruise terminal.
The shopping mall itself covers 92,000 sq metres and has 170 tenants, among them retailers such as Thalia, restaurants and a multiplex cinema with 2,200 seats. It offers 2,500 spaces for cars and 3,500 for bicycles as well as being connected to the local infrastructure by its own underground station and various bus lines. French developer and operator Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield (URW) is expecting more than 16 million visitors per year.
Building works started in 2019 but the project did not open its doors until six years later. In the meantime, the mall was hit by several serious backlashes, including the accidental death of six workmen. Shortly before the grand opening in April 2024 there was yet another delay due to technical problems, with water leaking into parts of the basement.
The investment volume rose from an estimate of €1.5bn to around €2.5bn, according to media reports, including approximately €620m of those costs deriving from compensation payments for tenants. While many restaurants and retailers had to make staff redundant, Thalia kept all booksellers on its payroll, deploying them to its branches in Hamburg and the surrounding area. Including Westfield, Thalia operates 11 branches in the city alone.
