Charlie Black / 08 May 2025 / Categories: City, What to do, Shops, Retail Parks, Shopping Centres and Malls

East Midlands Designer Outlet Mall

To go or not to go, that’s the question?

Mcarthur Glen is a retail shopping import from Europe with retail shopping malls all over the place, Netherlands, France, Italy Canada, Spain, Austria so I was excited to visit the East Midlands Designer Outlet in Nottingham to take a look. It was a extremely easy to find located at junction 28 just off the M1 motorway.

It’s marketed as a designer outlet, designer brands offering stock at discounted prices. And I was expecting the bargains and offering to be better than it was.

There’s a massive Marks and Spencer’s shop and a massive Nike shop if you like those brands, neither really appealed to me. I wouldn’t drive to browse M&S when we’ve got one in Fosse Park in Leicester.

The best shop I thought was the Calvin Klein shop where they did have a good selection of jeans and Calvin Klein lingerie, their basic cotton pants and bra tops I quite liked with about a 40% saving so you can find discounted Calvin Klein underwear.

The sunglasses hut had a really amazing selection of designer sunglasses and not old styles, the prices I thought were not outlet prices. I looked at a pair I liked way too expensive for me, around £400.

Loads of the shops, Yankee Doodle candles, Crew Clothing, Polo Association are not my style and there is a Claire’s, a Clark’s, a Cabury’s all the Cs as well as a Denby pottery shop and a Hallmark cards, does anybody buy cards anymore?

I stopped buying cards a few years ago, preferring to save the trees and send a digital message instead.

We were hoping to have lunch and the restaurant food options are limited if you want to sit down. The only restaurant we saw was Wagamama or cafeteria style cups of tea and coffee, sandwiches, scones, soup, you know the kind of place very noisy serve yourself, find a table and clean up after yourself when you are finished.

We opted for the later.

We didn’t go with anything specific in mind to buy, both my friends and I had budgets around £100, one shopped in Calvin Klein, the other in Molton Brown, I didn’t actually buy anything.

It might be better for men as I did notice a Boss store that did look very well merchandised and a Barbour outlet where you could save a few quid if you were in the market for a new wax jacket.

I thought it could have been definitely more exciting. It feels like there’s not a lot of cohesion, like they don’t know who their audience is and so the shops are very mixed, not just by brand and what they sell but also some shops are well merchandised while others more like a load of unsold stock the brands just want rid of. If you have ever been to an outlet mall in America it’s nothing like that.

If you are at a loose end and fancied a day out it’s somewhere to go and have a look around but not sure I’d be motivated to return unless it was at the request of someone visiting the Midlands who really wanted to go.