Brand Building through Spatial Design

With the rise of e-commerce and omnichannel retailing and the ubiquity of brands in the last few decades, the relevance, as well as design approaches for retailing and brand building, have evolved significantly. These novel challenges are demanding new approaches to retail store design. These are the challenges that tomorrow’s interior designers will be facing in their professional careers. To address this evolving nature of retail store design, this studio focused on the design of a variety of retail formats through the lens of brand building. The students selected a brand of their choice for this studio. Their projects commenced with an interpretation of the brand’s overall strategy with the perspective that brands are constantly evolving to thrive in competitive markets. They then selected a site and developed a program based on their understanding of the appropriate retail format and formulated design goals. Nuances of retail store design with a focus on consumer behavior were discussed and they then produced spatial design solutions for creating brand-centric customer experiences and presented the design with a complete set of schematic drawings to communicate the strategies.