Retail Design, a discipline in its own right

Abstract

This paper aims at adding knowledge and arguments to the idea of retail design as a discipline in its own right. Before a definition is proposed, the discipline and how it came into being is first described. The word ‘retail’ refers to the selling of goods to consumers. So, retail design should be about designing spaces to facilitate the selling of these goods. This also includes the selling of services. Designing retail interiors started to be recognized as a design discipline only in recent decades (Fitch and Knobel, 1990). Beforehand, it was rather an intuitive expression of commercial acumen. Similarly, traces of branding could already be found a long time ago, although traces of creating a recognizable identity with store design are of more recent times. In a first stage, graphics such as logos and fascia were used to communicate the brand values. Later, the design of the store interior also came into play (Fitch and Knobel, 1990). In the 1960s, though, it was still approached more artistically than functionally. Since the 1980s, the emancipation of the profession of interior design also impacted the professionalization of retail design, which started to lose its exclusively artistic dimensions (van Amerongen and Christiaans, 2004) to the benefit of more informed aspects.