ERDA shows Retail Design Trends around the World
2018-01-22

Cozy and Curated
Wood remains the most favourite element for store construction and determines the ambiance of a store. Dark wood creates a cozy, warmer and more genuine atmosphere than the clear design language of the Scandinavian style or sharp black-white contrasts.
The mix of different materials convinces by setting finely adjusted contrasts together with a creative and exceptional Visual Merchandising for a custom design of the retail space. Visual Merchandising enables a high flexibility of the space and creates the stage setting for ever-changing story-telling around curated collections. Curated retailing offers the customer a first pre-selection by grouping products across existing categories and product lines, creating new lifestyle-worlds and meeting points. Modern stores understand food service, cafés and restaurants as important parts of the shopping experience. Today they have become a commodity in modern retail spaces of nearly all retail sectors.
In the food business supermarkets set the focus on freshness, local products and more personality as well as customer proximity. They present themselves as new neighborhood markets turning customers into guests. Customer Engagement
In a world of a growing competition from suppliers online, modern stores have to create unique environments that seduce, attract and entertain customers at the point of sale. Whether it is an iconic architecture, an enhancing store design, lighting or the embedding of state-of-the-art media in the shop fitting, everything has to follow a joint dramaturgy to give customers that certain kick. Thus the dovetailing of physical and online stores is generating new retail and interior design concepts.
There will be more interacting applications which engage customers such as interactive fitting rooms, web bars for online selection, stock checking and ordering, social-media based customer communication, receipt-free purchasing and mobile payment for a quicker checkout process or special configuration tools to support the customers to create their personal items.

The winners…
To emerge from the competition as a winner, this year's participants again had to appeal to customers with a successful combination of shop architecture, colours, materials, lighting and visual merchandising and convey an unambiguous message in relation to their product offering. On the evening of April 26th, to kick off the C-star trade fair in Shanghai, EHI and Messe Düsseldorf will grant the EuroShop RetailDesign Awards to the stores with the best concepts.
> See Nominees for 2018
> See Past Years' Award Winners