The Art Of Visual Story Telling In Stores As Community Spaces

At a time when lifestyle, businesses and services are all getting redefined, the retail space is more than just a transactional point, evolving more into a community hub. Given this, what is the design sensibility that works best? In this column, part of her series for VM&RD, Angela Kreutz shares her take.

As interior architects, we create spaces for individual encounters and multilayered experiences, and in the process, we stage a narrative – the kind of storytelling that invites customers on a journey and conveys the spirit of a brand. We lend brands concrete dimensions, provide them with the space to unfold, and render the abstract tangible.

Today, stores are meeting places, places to linger, and experiences in themselves. And the emotionalization of their surfaces plays a fundamental role in this regard. Redesigning and covering these surfaces flexibly and in new ways to appeal to the relevant target groups over and over again is essential to the customer journey and thus to successful customer experience. What is important in this respect is to sense and anticipate customers’ wishes, to guide them through the store by means of visual merchandising, and to inspire them by setting the products out in the right way. Ideally, the customer journey also includes the right website and communications strategy on social media.