informal manifesto: part 1 — Universal Solutions
The informal manifesto traces back the origins of the decline of retail spaces and proposes a new way forward by reintroducing informality to shopping. It drafts the intellectual framework underpinning Informal Retail, a startup which installs retail embedded within existing local businesses and stocks them with a rotating selection of brands.
- first wave: universal solutions
It wasn’t long before the initial success of the first department stores in the world’s capitals inspired a massive scaling of their concept. What was once an incredible outburst of vision and entrepreneurship from the innovators and creatives behind them quickly became a formula followed by the entire booming industry. These department stores’ convenience, clarity, and consistency were celebrated as core values for this increasingly industrialized era. Shop windows, extravagant displays and delirious views down their atriums brought some irrationality to excite the shoppers of these newly created cathedrals of commerce, rendering smaller shops and their dusty displays obsolete.
Yet soon after this initial scaling of the concept, further rationalization started taking place. No longer left to the whims of the art directors, every parameter of the shopping experience was soon calculated, optimized and deployed consistently across multiple locations. This was very much in line with the modernist vision of society of the time which completely transformed our environments by striving to find universal solutions which responded to standard human proportions and behaviors and were highly scalable. From aisle widths, to lighting levels, reflectivity of floor materials, display fixtures, fitting rooms sizes and highly optimized shelving planograms, retail spaces across the world were no longer just inspired by each other, they literally became clones of each other, down to the fraction of an inch.
This allowed for rampant scaling — architects and merchandisers could now design and open hundreds of locations from a single office, regardless of the context of the site, as the blueprints of the shopping experience had been premeditated. Incredible profitability ensured from this standardization, as most customers open heartedly embraced this wave of modernity, never having experienced such an abundance and selection of products and competitive prices. Even as pale imitations of the original department stores, these clones communicated an exciting new future of possibility. Access to the latest fashions and appliances was freedom — freedom from the past.
