Sometimes, when we enter a shop, what we are looking for is a particular atmosphere or feeling able to stimulate our inner world made of colours, perfumes, images and memories. Something that helps us forget for a moment our everyday life and the all our duties. How surprised would we be if, for example, while entering a sporting goods retailer we had the impression of walking on a tennis court, or on the red and green terrain of a running track? This is what retail design does in order to face the future challenges: to transform shopping in to an experience that can be frozen in people’s mind.

It is clear now that retail needs to modernize. Distribution and consumption habits are experimenting great changes in the direction of e-commerce and new organization and use of the selling spaces.

One of the key-concepts defining these global trends emerged during the Retail Industry 2020 event, which took place last May at the Marche Polytechnic University. It can be summarized using only one word: experience. Experience, in fact, is something e-commerce cannot provide. A real store, on the contrary, can, but it requires a project aiming to amaze, entertain, create memories regarding the shopping experience. Retail design and visual merchandising need to redesign the spaces to create new, exotic worlds to explore, taking the visitors back to past times or on to the future, stimulating their fantasy.

Fusina collaborates with designers and digital storytellers to work on retail design projects aiming to meet these expectative, creating multisensorial worlds that accompany the visitors far from their everyday life, personalizing the spaces with always changing concepts:

Art: In the Avery perfume boutiques at Excelsior in Milan and London the scents are no longer just that: they become artworks displayed along a path made of precious fabrics, wood furniture, brass and olfactory blown glass bubbles that recall distant places.

Infinity: We all know smell is one of the most powerful senses. To launch Prada new perfume Candy, Fusina created Prada Infinity Box. Inside this magic box light plays with the mirror film placed on the plexiglass walls, thus accompanying the visitors through an infinite hallway covered with petals, leading to the suspended perfume phial. Daydreaming.

Play: Visitors of the Diesel store in Milan have the illusion of a return to the past, when as a child he or she stayed inside the car during the car wash, staring hypnotically at the rotating brushes like on a carousel. Diesel in motion reproduces the brushes using denim fabric, livening up the shop windows and the whole environment.

In any field of production – fashion, perfumery, or anything else – retail design can transform a store in to a dynamic space where visitors can live long lasting experiences, and creating long lasting relationships.