Re:Tail? Re:think, Re:Invent, Re:design, Re:public!!! Yes, the above is not merely a smorgasbord of loose words thrown together with a common suffix, but instead carries huge weight of responsibility and accountability towards a new retail era! An era-enriched in brand experience, marketing initiatives, design exuberance and sheer awesomeness. All this will be time relevant when it finds a social resonance by being people-intrinsic and people-inclusive. It’s designing a dream! A dream that promises to be a reality. Beauty emerges out of its integrities and coherent qualities. Retail design is like a rich woven tapestry in which colours are distilled from the experience of the senses stimulated by design. These experiences when form a collective quilt of socio-communal patchworks, it emerges out as not a halt or oneshop- stop but a destination in itself. A place where one could meet-ngreet, shop-n-play, share face time and thus connect.
Etymology:
A marketplace is a location where goods and services are exchanged. The traditional market square is a city square where traders set up stalls and buyers browse the stores. This kind of market is very old, and countless such markets are still in operation around the whole world. That’s the basic, most essential form of retail where one sells his produce directly to the buyer. Later in time, with growing needs the produce or the make got classified, depending upon its size, scale, quantity, make etc. and thus got categorised for business on a larger scale. Discount stores, general stores and variety stores, being an everyday concept. Convenience stores, supermarkets and hypermarkets were natural
followers. Specialty stores and concept stores where positive retail experiments with brand initiatives. Big Box stores and Factory outlets are new ball game altogether. With technology becoming indispensable part of our lives; e-Tailors i.e. on-line automated retail (including vending machines) made the options available to the end-user beyond speed, time and place. And now it’s changing the face of retail, as we speak! Technology is faster beyond imagination. It blurs borders of limitations and expands horizons of possibilities to a virgin realm. With smart phones and shopping apps cluttering with plethora of options, retail is unbound. Customers are not bringing phones to the stores anymore, they are bringing stores to their phones and in such changing times, how do we, as business facilitators retain the sanctity of design experience infact and infused with retail avenues?
Change is need of the hour
Since the customers have changed the way they shop. As retailers you should change the way you sell… and as designers we should help you achieve it at a confluence of business and pleasure for maximum advantage to both patrons and providers. This is brings us back to the maxim, we started with: We need to cohesively, rethink and reinvent, retail design to make it republic, once again! repurchase in the future. For brands, every opportunity they have to influence a customer’s experience of their brand, and their later behaviour towards it, can be designed. Experience design is not driven by a single design discipline but instead requires a cross-discipline perspective that enables all aspects of the brand or business to be communicated. Designers can make anything from products, packaging and a retail environment to the clothing and attitude of employees, part of a brand
Design Experiential
So retail is ultimately about people engagements and brand dialogues which forms basis of one-to-one conversations. It’s about Experiential Design! Experience design (XD) is the practice of designing products, processes, services, events, and environments with a focus placed on the quality of the user experience and culturally relevant solutions. An emerging discipline, experience design draws from many other disciplines*1 including psychology, architecture and environment design along with storytelling and brand thinking.
We see its recent manifestations in form of a Concept Store. A concept store is a retail store that goes beyond simply selling products and instead appeals to a general sense of lifestyle by offering products to match the desires of those involved in a particular social scene. Rather than simply offering a selection of standard products for purchase, this type of store sells products that appeal to a particular segment of consumer. While there is no single form a concept store typically takes, in general it is designed to appeal to a certain segment of the populace. The design and aesthetic of a concept store is also likely to be quite distinct, unlike a standard department store or retail outlet store. Since the store itself has a general concept with regard to the merchandise available, the design and decoration of the store often matches that concept.
One can design and create,the most wonderful place in the world.But it takes people to make the dream a reality. We believe in advocating a school of thought that liberates community places, reinvents them for a future social context but at the same time, hand holds retail, which foster experience-rich spaces. Good design is not only problem solving, But providing newer solutions… solutions for tomorrow. We are working on a retail design decorum, which identifies such urban spaces in existing prevalent schemes. As a style of thinking, design thinking is generally considered the ability to combine empathy for the context of a problem, creativity in the generation of insights and solutions, and rationality to analyse and fit solutions to the context.
About the authors
Shubhashish Modi is Director of Arris Architecture and Seema Lele is Architect and Brand Manager, Arris Architecture.
