Twenty Years with Store Design

It is almost exactly 20 years ago that I began my love affair with the retail design world.

It was a slightly different world, of course, than it is now. Twenty years will do that. Some of those early 1994-era memories:

● Computer-aided manufacturing programs were allowing fixture makers to customize almost anything retailers could design, turning merchandise presentations into unique, creative expressions of the retailer’s “brand” – a mid-90s buzzword that has only proliferated since.

● As fixture manufacturing evolved from commodity cabinet-making into stylish engineering, the Store Fixturing Show soared in Chicago (eventually becoming GlobalShop).

● Sadly, though, retailers – who could now produce their own innovative presentations with fixtures – began to deemphasize visual merchandising. Dedicated in-store teams of trained artists who could do wonderful things with pins and glue guns became an expensive indulgence, especially across national chains of hundreds of stores.

● Retailers found they could accomplish almost as much visual excitement with printed graphics – another area of significant technological advancement.

● Jon Greenberg Associates and Warner Bros. collaborated on a store in New York full of fabricated cartoon characters and “retailtainment” was off and running. Tony Mancini took his creative skills to Disney, where he produced one fantastic character-driven store after another. And Nike began to roll out NikeTowns – more museums than they were stores.

Did anyone have a budget anymore? It was the go-go 90s, but still . . .

● The apex of this might have been the Viacom store on Michigan Avenue, a testimonial to that company’s movie, TV and music properties. Apart from the fact that most consumers had no idea who or what Viacom was, the store was way too expensive to ever succeed. It soon went the way of Beavis & Butthead.

● As if in retaliation, Calvin Klein opened a store on Madison Avenue that was clean and spare. “Minimalism” as a high-fashion design concept was born.

● In the mid 90s, all the editors had computer terminals at their desks. But only one centrally placed computer in the building had internet access. The younger staffers lined up to get onto that computer and “surf the web,” while the older ones among us wondered what that fuss was about.

● Many retailers tried to anticipate this trend by putting computer stations in their stores so shoppers could search for merchandise or watch informational videos. They were called “kiosks.” They were supposed to be the future. Many of them didn’t work.

● An exhibit was created for GlobalShop in which people could shop a store from the outside, even if it were closed, using various forms of interactive digital communications. People thought it was a fascinating experiment. But, really, what did it have to do with the business of retailing?

As a journalist, writer, editor and commentator, Steve Kaufman has been watching the store design industry for 20 years. He has seen the business cycle through retailtainment, minimalism, category killers, big boxes, pop-ups, custom stores, global roll-outs, international sourcing, interactive kiosks, the emergence of China, the various definitions of “branding” and Amazon.com. He has reported on the rise of brand concept shops, the demise of brand concept shops and the resurgence of brand concept shops. He has been an eyewitness to the reality that nothing stays the same, except the retailer-shopper relationship.