Visual Merchandising and Store Design | VMSD.com

(September 2008) posted on Mon Sep 29, 2008

Timberland helps bring LEED for Retail to market by participating in the rating system’s pilot program.

By Anne DiNardo

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The Timberland corporate culture has been promoting the environment for years: setting standards to become a carbon-neutral company by 2010; designing products that can be recycled at the end of their lifecycle into new products; and opening stores with sustainable design principles.

So when the U.S. Green Building Council put out a call for participants to test its new LEED for Retail rating system, Timberland jumped on board.

“Our past store designs have included reclaimed wood, low-VOC paints and energy-efficient lighting,” says Allan Buell, Timberland’s store construction project manager. “But we hadn’t considered LEED certification because there wasn’t a specific guideline for a retail build-out within a mall.”

The new LEED for Retail rating system, which opens to the market in 2009, addresses green building issues specific to the retail sector. More than 40 companies volunteered for the pilot phase. Timberland tested the certification system while building two new stores, at North Shore Mall in Peabody, Mass., and Rockingham Mall in Salem, N.H. Both stores opened in 2007 and were LEED certified in early 2008, with the Peabody location earning gold-level certification and Salem earning silver.

“Timberland was already halfway there through its corporate policies and existing store initiatives,” says Bill Mokris of Cowan + Associates (Worthington, Ohio), the architecture and MEP engineering firm for the project.

Both LEED stores embody the brand’s natural aesthetic with plenty of wood finishes and fixtures. But there were several hurdles to jump before achieving that look. In mall spaces, only 10 percent of store materials can be combustible, by law. Cowan talked to Timberland about changing its design to meet codes, but the retailer wanted to maintain brand consistency. So Cowan and Timberland found a fire retardant chemical for dipping the wood that would still meet LEED requirements. “Since natural materials are part of their corporate image, we had to find a way to make it work,” says Mokris.