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Sustainable Momentum

(October 2011) posted on Thu Oct 06, 2011

As the retail industry keeps moving toward a recovery, is green design following suit?


By Anne DiNardo

There’s a buzz in the air again. Design firms are adding staff. Requests for proposals are coming through. Retail epicenters like New York’s Fifth Avenue and Paris’ Avenue des Champs-Élysées are welcoming new flagships.

So as the industry moves forward, albeit at a cautious pace, is green design still part of the conversation?

To develop a picture of the state of green retailing, we brought together retailers and designers to gather their thoughts on how green retail has changed, what challenges still exist and what the future holds.

VMSD: Last year when we took the pulse of the industry, the sentiment was that green design was slow because the whole industry was slow. Now that activity is picking back up, is green design following?
Rachel Zsembery:
It’s almost as if the conversation concerning green has changed within the last year. We still find retailers that want to go through a holistic approach with LEED certification. But in a lot of cases, it’s more about identifying specific areas where you can make a targeted improvement and then tracking the paybacks for that on an individual basis, which seems a little more manageable.

Todd Taylor: In our world, it never slowed. Regardless of whether you’re going forward with new construction or renovating, there are always opportunities to incorporate the principles from a sustainable perspective. We’ve tried to continue to move in that vein as opposed to stopping because the funds aren’t available.

Lori Kolthoff: I think technology has come a long way, too, and groups like the military and the automotive industry are starting to share that technology and making things available that we didn’t have before. We’re also seeing more retailers asking designers to bring it to the table.

So are retailers the ones pushing green design forward?
Jim Sloss:
I wouldn’t say that we’re pushing, but we’ve been reaching out to the vendor community and letting them know our interest in doing green design. The more questions we ask, the more we learn how to improve our practices and then we’re a little bit better about our choices in what we specify.


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