informal manifesto: part 5 — Deconstructing Scale
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.
5. informality 2: deconstructing scale
Format alone does not create context. Context is also generated by thinking at the scale of communities, of the fabric of cities, neighborhoods, local businesses. Instead of pursuing surgical interventions such as grafting a new flagship store in a hip neighborhood — often debilitating the very environment which made it originally attractive — an acupunctural approach appears more effective and beneficial to all. Small, precise, localised interventions, like needles hitting knotted nerves, can stimulate new flows of energy, possibility and connection. Instead of stifling them by breaking the scale of their existence, informal retail installations, delicately placed, add a new layer of meaning and exchange within communities. It creates an active network which strengthens them and allows them to flourish.
It’s an all too familiar story, as pop-ups and experiential activations become new formulas, brands embrace them more as panicked responses than deliberate and authentic strategies for creating or communicating actual meaning. In fact, established brands opening in edgy neighborhoods — whether permanently or even temporarily — tend to do more in transforming the perception of the area than in truly providing new context for their products. Like new organs grafted into a living system, they get rejected and damage its integrity if they do not assimilate into its existing flows and patterns.
Making new connections while preserving the authenticity of the existing context requires the right amount of blending in, and the right amount of standing out. Blending in means embedding within existing businesses and cultural, social establishments. Standing out means appropriating a new kind of space — neither overseen by the space in which it’s present, neither directed by the brands which it carries. The presence of this third mediating party relieves all other participants from being overly protective of their brand images, and interfaces directly with the customers, surprising them with the freshness and diversity of its offering.
