Visions of retail in the age of uncertainty
Should we open stores?Should we not open stores?Does brick and mortar still make sense in a world where consumerism is set to rely more and more on digital tools and channels? The business of retail is so entangled with the concept of physical space that, even though consumers are growing accustomed with e-brands like Amazon, JD.com, Alibaba, most of the biggest e-commerce companies around the world are still in fact omnichannel retailers, with bricks-and-mortar as well as online stores.
Physical stores can be in fact the high point of the relationship between brands and customers. That’s why it is crucial, when designing for retail, to interpretate contexts and to rethink spaces, according to their new, evolving meaning. The so called demalling phenomenon, which comes from observations about the demise of traditional shopping centres, sort of witnesses the attempt to re-invent spaces to best suit emerging consumers’ needs.
All of this is something the guys at RetailDesign, a collective of architects and designers based in Venice, Italy, know very well. They delivered an interesting speech, flavoured up with a comprehensive showcase of their project, earlier this month at PromotionExpo, in Milan. What do they do? Well, kind of what every architect and designer nowadays dreams of doing — super immersive spatial experiences that transform corny surroundings into something ever-seen-before.
For big retail chain Carrefour in Carugate , near Milan, RetailDesign put in place an impressive layout, heavily relying on light design as well as on interiors. A great intuition was the treatment they dedicated to the check-out area, identified as one of the most distressful touchpoint, often seen as a discouragingly barrier to the use of the entire space (hypermarket+grocery superstore) as a frictionless whole. The team resorted to an extensive use of colours to spruce up the area and at the same time make users’ movements from and to the store the most seamless possible. In this case the contribution of design thinking to the process allowed to find some pain points in the customer journey and to respond to them in a commercially viable way.
This was pretty much the strategic part of the process; but we know design thinking is also creativity and lateral thinking. In the aforementioned project, the whole job wasn’t just about finding the format, but also about setting an unexpected tone of voice, which could charm customers and stir curiosity.
For almost two decades, RetailDesign have been championing the reuse of abandoned or derelict spaces in the urban fabric, pioneering important projects like Librerie Coop, a one of a kind -at that time- format, which leveraged also on the popularity of iconic or underused venues, made available by institutions to promote small publishers and cultural activities.
Again for Italian grocery retailer Coop, the agency put recently their signature on FiorFood, an innovative concept store in the historic heart of Turin: an idea deeply rooted in the context of new formats, blending together innovation, traditional arts and crafts and emerging cultures.
Coop’s consumers, more sophisticated, more informed, more demanding, are absorbed and involved because “they find in these places a pleasurable space for relationship, innovation and socialisation” (P.Lucchetta, RetailDesign). Here, the act of purchase is just one of the possible aspects of the experience.
The store mixes together food, books, cultural and social events. Tremendous emphasis is given here to Coop private label products, which are mostly promoted in terms of quality and sustainability. Hey, this sounds a bit like Mercato Metropolitano, right? — Interesting experiment sprouted in Milan back in 2015 and now based in London, which I had the chance to take part in and it’s now on the outlook to expand in other markets, with the support of people at RetailDesign!)
A similar logic of reuse and impermanence underpins concepts such as BoxPark, an authentic pop up mall made up of ecological shipping containers, hosting fashion designers, restaurants and cafes, music and cultural events, which has become a landmark of East London.
So, place still matters. A report by Deloitte on the Global Powers of Retailing in 2016 document how “the majority of the biggest global e-tailers (39 out of 50 companies) are omnichannel retailers with bricks-and-mortar stores as well as online and other non-store operations. Eleven companies in the report are non-store or web-only retailers, including Amazon, which by the time the report was out was already set to open its first brick and mortar stores.
Of all a brand’s facets, packaging represents the very physical expression of the aim and philosophy of a product and as it is what consumers end up handling and fuddling with, it holds a great place in their perception of that brand. This is why design thinking, so concerned wth empathy and the meaning which lies at the core of a product, can really find in packaging room for disruption. From technical disruption, to a logistic disruption, to a new successful business model…Wait a moment, are we just talking about every strategist’s pipe dream, are we? Actually, there is someone who made up a $555 Million Startup in less than 2 years, literally on people’s dreams.
Casper is a lucrative mattress startup, whose mission is “helping people re-think the very concept of sleep”. The problems this company is trying to solve for its customers are chronic tiredness and the difficulties to take a good rest. Its USP rejects the notion that mattresses need to be customised to people’s sleeping positions. To say it up with the words of Luke Sherwin, Casper’s chief creative officer,“With the mattress, it’s not one size fits absolutely everyone. It’s one size fits high 90 percentages of everyone, and that’s something we’re willing to cater to”. The clever product soon went viral, triggering a real craze on YouTube, with people going kind of bananas unboxing Caspers’ mattresses.
Solutions, not complications. Casper kicked off producing and retailing mattress model at time, its mantra being, simplifying things for their customers: packaging -a box containing the fold mattress- convenient home delivery, and reduction in the number of decisions for purchasers to make, are all making life easier for customers. The mattress may not fit 100% of potential shoppers, but it suits the majority of the target’s lifestyle and needs. Communications reinforce all this, through simple and usable websites, clever social media marketing and a sound educational content strategy, which comprises a magazine on sleep and pop-up stores with free events for customers.
A product is a physical object, something you can make and sell. That’s how we are used to conceive it, but in our digital world things have proceeded further. Things get smarter and connected, hence product designers are becoming Product-Service-Systems designers. Traditionally, the process for the creation of a new product would start roughly with market segmentation, the identification of interesting demographic cohorts and the definition of a target customers group.
Traditional product design process, from Megan Neese, “What is a Product?”
Now, the definition of a product rely deeply on the concept of space.
Acnestudios flagship stores in Madison Avenue, New York and Potsdamer Straße, in Berlin, are an example of this. The concept stores are designed as real art galleries, where the product…Well, it’s just disappeared, maybe because it is no longer needed to communicate the brand. Space, layout and format are doing the trick.
Originally published at medium.com on April 24, 2017.
