HeyShop store in Shanghai designed by Daylab Studio is the offline elegant and futuristic store that embodies the retail of the current online shopping era.
HeyShop is China’s leading e-commerce platform for indie brands and operate as a new type of collection store, driven by big data, merging online with offline (OMO).
The new integrated retail approach formed by online and offline realities has become the hottest topic of this era, both for e-commerce giants — that are actively expanding the offline retail sector, and the traditional offline retail industry seeking for an effective online model.
As we can see at HeyShop, this new OMO model has some specific characteristics. Unlike the traditional retail, flexibility is the most crucial feature in HeyShop because products are displayed based on the big data analysis and are coming from different brands and categories that could change over time. Today, HeyShop may sell cosmetics, while tomorrow it may sell electronics.
Hence it is the mission for this new type of OMO retail to increase and create a continuously changing display system to recommend new products to the public. To fulfill this requirement, Daylab Studio opted for the most flexible solution: a perforated plate display.
But, because of OMO, the display quantity became not as much important as before since it could be shown from online, whereas fitting rooms, the crucial part of the experience, play a much more important role at the moment, cause it cannot be replaced by online service. Seven fitting rooms come out in this 200 m2 little store, to meet the requirement of the physical shopping experience. The fitting rooms are located in the middle of the shop, dividing the entire store as front section (home accessory part) and rear section (clothing part). Customers could pass through any one of the unused fitting rooms. An OCCUPIED/PASS mechanism is instead activated when the fitting room is taken.
Another rule to be broken in retail design is to set the storage at the front. Again, it is also based on the feature of OMO new retail. As HeyShop could set the storage in the cloud, less physical space is needed and storage could be combined with package and cash counter together and set at the front of the store.
Finally, the online shopping elements were placed in the physical store to encouraging customers to make online order while doing offline shopping and make the online and offline experiences merge together.
Dylan Studio created here for HeyShop a phygital (physical+digital) retail space whose key element is the fitting rooms/central aisle space. Undoubtedly, this project will set a new trend in retail design for its possibility to answer to the new requirement of the omni-channel reality. As Daylab Studio says: “Around the concept of new OMO retail, we not only offer a nice fancy store, but also try to define the game rules of the NEW RETAIL in this new age as well as propose a new strategy for commercial retail transformation.”
If you are intrigued by the new retail design trends, you can check also Gachot Studios’ new immersive Glossier Flagship Store in New York City.
All images courtesy Yun Xiao.
