TANGIBLE FORMS OF THE IDEAS IN THE MAX&CO RETAIL

When Max&Co, a rewarded hi-end fashion brand, has announced the open call for the worldwide design identity of the brand stores, many creative offices have participated.

Andrea Tognon Architecture, based in Milan, Italy, has teamed up with several creative practices to meet this challenge. The design started with several workshops involving very different subjects like musicians, artists, economists, designers, brainstorming together. The challenge was to synthesize those several inputs in a real architectural space. The project´s outcome is the result of the exciting collaboration of Andrea Tognon Architecture with the Max Mara group “in house” architecture department and three more specialized studios. Free standing furniture’s were designed by Ciszak Dalmas and by the Max Mara design office. All the lights systems designed by the architects were developed and engineered with Turnlight. Studio Pepe styled temporary windows installation.

This project implements a new approach to the retail design to foster a new shopping experience. It creates a “shopper-friendly” environment, a welcoming & cozy ambiance, brimming with sensorial and emotional stimuli. Eliminating that sense of displacement generated by impersonal and cold spaces, infinitely reproducible by cloning in any context. Instead, a new radically rethought stores identity recovers and showcases the authenticity, uniqueness, and specialness of the customer’s shopping experience and the product’s value.

Ciszak Dalmas explains the main guidelines of the furniture collection design: ¨The furniture puts the collections on a stage, holding together all the pieces of a look, from clothes to details, from shoes to bag. Crafted in solid walnut wood, brass, and lacquered iron. Genuine, freestanding, diverse, functional, with striking yet smooth and poetic lines.¨

Now 450 label boutique worldwide have implemented this design, that is already three years old and makes us wonder what will be the next spin the retail of the big Italian fashion giant will take.