Store concepts for Leon Cycle, Brooks Brothers, Wrangler and Paul Lafayet - designed as systems, not one-offs.
Not every good idea gets built. These four concepts were developed for international brands facing the same underlying problem: a design that has to work more than once.
Process
Concept Design
Schematic Design
Detail Design
Tender Documentation
Tender Management
Construction Support
Post-Completion Review
Leon Cycle came to us with an e-bike business and a mission - omni-channel innovation and a data-driven, hybrid buying experience, to introduce electric bicycles to everyone. We began by auditing their existing 343 sqm Hanover store and setting out plainly what was not working: unclear zoning, no visible category boundaries, no distinction between product a customer can handle and product that is display only, a space that felt dark and homemade, and a cafe that was a missed experiential opportunity. Benchmarking against Rapha, REI and Dick's Sporting Goods, we developed two spatial strategies at 500 sqm - the Open Fronted and the Inner Courtyard - each built from the same six-part kit: bike showcase, accessories, test track, workshop and customisation, cafe and point of sale, and customer engagement.
Brooks Brothers asked us to give one of the most iconic American clothing brands a new home at IFC in Hong Kong, across 140 sqm. Our concept, the House of Brooks Brothers, reboots a heritage label with an expanded womenswear range and reduced emphasis on formal wear, built around shop-in-shop environments that allow specialised visual merchandising stories, events and activation. A micro museum, a speakeasy snug, an alterations and monogramming bar, and bookable stylist fittings give a customer reasons to visit that an e-commerce site cannot offer.
Wrangler wanted a flagship expressing their Wear with Abandon campaign. The Launch Room takes its cue from preparation and pre-performance areas in sport - the moment before, the calm before the storm - rendered in concrete, engineered metals under tension, terrazzo and architectural mesh. Performance engineered, not rustic rodeo.
Paul Lafayet is the same idea in food. We designed a flagship cafe for the patisserie brand in Shanghai, conceived from the outset as a testbed for a wider rollout of their cafe and bakery concept across China. An open-plan cake preparation workshop sits in full view of customers, giving the space visual theatre and the aroma of fresh baking - and it reads from the adjacent shopping arcade too, where passers-by can watch the finishing flambe being applied to the creme brulees.
The Mannings Health Pod — a glass-enclosed space for rapid wellness assessments, positioned as the store's centrepiece and primary point of differentiation.
A spacious check-out, designed as a clearly differentiated fixture-set in order to allow customers to locate with ease.
NFC-enabled 'lift & learn' product displays allow customers to access detailed product information in the moment, without staff intervention.
Percentage allocation is meaningless without assigning SKUs to brands. We can only plan a store based upon facts.
Selected views
(Approach)Every one of these is a kit of parts. Change the site, the market or the footprint, and the system still holds.
An axonometric study showing the flexibility of the shop-in-shop and how it can be adjusted to meet VM requirements.
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A birdseye view of one of the Brooks Brother concept stores showing the modular fixture strategy.
A concept sketch of the Leon Cycle store flagship blueprint - planned as a testbed and 'idea mothership' for subsequent roll-out and format derivatives.
Concept planning for Leon Cycle store.
The discipline shows most clearly in the work that never got built.
Wrangler's wall bay is a four-layer kit - a concrete back layer, a translucent graphic layer, a mid mesh layer for intermediate and hero displays, and a front mesh layer with adjustable slotted uprights for shelving, rails and graphics. It was designed to be readily changeable and scalable so that the system can be used at any scale or format of store. Brooks Brothers uses modular wall bays and shop-in-shop zones so the layout can be future-proofed against market performance, expanding or contracting elements as the business changes. Leon Cycle's kit of parts was tested across two entirely different plan strategies before either was drawn in detail. Paul Lafayet's flagship was drawn as the reference for a China-wide rollout rather than as a single cafe.
On Leon we also pushed back on the brief. The client supplied percentage allocations per brand; we asked for SKU counts instead, on the grounds that percentages cannot be planned against. Averaging their Hanover, Barcelona and Melbourne stores established that front of house should not exceed 300 sqm, with back of house calculated site by site against each location's storage requirement.
None of these was built as drawn. All of them answer the same question, which is the one worth asking before anything else: what happens the second time, and the tenth?
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