The Fashion Retail Academy has had long-standing relationships with many retailers, one of these is Bicester Village, a luxury open-air outlet in Oxfordshire, who set up a small VM task and competition for the students on the visual merchandising course.
It was a group project where we were tasked to design a visual concept for a pop-up store in Bicester Village through a medium of our choice, with a particular focus on creating a social media photo opportunity.
We had to present our work to representatives of Bicester Village and our group was chosen as the winners of the competition.
We visited Bicester Village around mid-January, just the week before Chinese New Year, where we were given a presentation about the centre and briefed on our task before taking a look around the stores. As the outlet is heavily frequented by Chinese tourists and they often go all out to make them feel welcome through their Chinese New Year celebrations, we thought centring our pop-up store around Chinese New Year would provide us with an interesting theme to play around with as well as the chance to appeal to a wide array of costumers, both international and local, who flock to the centre to witness the celebrations.
After researching the stores currently in the Village, we realised that they were almost all fashion-oriented stores with a few homeware ones dotted around, we saw that there was a gap in the market for other type of services, specifically stationery which is a type of souvenir that is often inexpensive and can grant a bit of luxury even on the tightest budgets. Based on that we decided for Bicester Village to collaborate with Poketo, a LA based stationery and lifestyle brand known for its bright and bold use of colour. Poketo as of date doesn't have any physical stores outside of the US and mostly relies on online sales, we thought this would be an interesting opportunity for the brand to test out European waters and also introduce it to Chinese consumers.
Our concept was to create a pop-up that is part stationery store, part workshop space, part art gallery. We took inspiration from the recently growing trend of bullet journaling, we want to turn the store into a workshop space were people can be introduced to bullet journaling and taught how to create a bullet journal. Poketo would be providing all materials to help the teaching and to also showcase their product offering and get costumers interested in purchasing after the workshop. Poketo is no stranger to workshops as it often holds them in its LA retail spaces, creating opportunities for the community to come together. We chose bullet journaling because of its growing popularity and also because it's an activity that would allow costumers to interact with almost all of Poketo's products, as heavily decorated, colourful journals tend to make for quite popular social media posts.
For the store's photo opportunity we thought of creating a giant bullet journal page where people would be able to write messages and take pictures to then post on social media. As our idea for the pop-up is heavily visual, Instagram would be an ideal platform to share such content and quickly spread the word about the event.
We researched inspirations for the look of the store, and as we went along our idea started developing further and become more concrete. As we wanted to connect this to Chinese New Year, we looked into symbols of the celebration and red lanterns were something that stood out to us, we wanted to do something similar while still keeping to the concept of bullet journaling. We came up with the idea of having the journal pages created by our costumers hang from the ceilings of the store like lanterns, but that still wasn't inspiring enough, so we further developed it and came up with our final concept.
The pop-up would run for one week leading up to Chinese New year, we would have daily bullet journaling workshops up to three times a day, the pages would be created using glow in the dark ink and then hung onto the ceiling of the store, from which they will alternatively come up and down so as to be in reach of curious costumers who might want to have a closer look, people will also be able to see them hanging through the store window drawing crowds inside. On the eve of Chinese New Year, and the last day of the pop-up, they would be brought outside and hung across from the pop-up to the store in front, and as night falls and celebrations grow they would start glowing like red lanterns in the night sky. It would create an added photo opportunity together with the workshops and the giant journal inside the store and show costumers that the brand has done their research while also adding a personal touch.
We created a sketchup model to better visualise the store, we wanted it to be a small intimate space with a lot of wooden fixtures and heavily inspired by the consistent look of Poketo's stores. We would be having tables and comfortable seating around the store for the workshops, we were't able to render it but the rounded booth-like seats are actually supposed to be beanbags. On the left wall we will have a combination of merchandise and TV screens showing examples of bullet pages and tutorials for the non-workshop times. We chose to relegate merchandise to the walls because we didn't want the store to be product heavy, the product sold is important, but the atmosphere and experience was of far greater importance to us, as a 7 day store we wanted it to leave an impression and be memorable.
We made a video out of the sketchup mockup to better showcase the store at different angles, on here you'll be able to get an idea of what it might look like with the hanging journal pages. Outside of the store we are also going to have a coffee cart to welcome costumers on their way towards the store.
We created a concept board to give a better idea of what the store will look like, it will be heavily inspired by Poketo's existing stores as shown in the top left-hand corner and central image. We will be having exposed industrial ceilings showing the mechanism by wich the pages are moving up and down and recessed spotlights to give the store a bright daylight look wich will be accentuated by the unobstructed windows bringing in natural sunlight. We chose spotlights in order to avoid overwhelming the ceiling, we didn't want to risk taking away attention from the pages by having eye-catching light fixtures. The flooring will be grey concrete and the walls will be white on 3/4 of the store while the remaining wall will be cladded in ash wood, fixtures and detailing on walls will be in a lighter pine wood. We will be having round tables with wooden tops and brightly coloured metal legs as seen in the Poketo stores, chairs will be in reverse with colourful plastic tops and wooden legs. There's going to be different seatings in addition to the chairs, from comfortable wide sofa benches to relaxing beanbags, all accessorised with an array of cushions and throws from Poketo's own range to give a cosy, intimate cafe feel to the store. The colourscheme of the store will be influenced by the brand's own colourful logo with pops of red, blue and yellow all around.
Outside of the store we are going to have a coffee stand with a very vintage look wich will extend to its retro drip coffee machine, the cart will be wooden with accents of yellow. The whole thing will be very hipsterish and experiential, we will be creating coffee art inspired by the year of the rat, the zodiac animal for Chinese New Year 2020, and it will suffice as a first stop for costumers coming across the store and the first photo opportunity during their costumer journey.
Inside the store we are going to have our main photo opportunity, the giant bullet journal page, which will be made out of white board, everyday new designs created by the in-store VM teams will appear, having a different theme daily could prove as an opportunity to for repeat visits by customers who might want to see what the newest design of the day is.