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| | Barbie Shanghai Wins ‘Good Design is Good Business’ Award and Best International Retail Interior |
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Barbie Shanghai, the world’s first store dedicated to the iconic doll, has won a “Good Design is Good Business” Award of Excellence and, additionally, an award for Best International Retail Interior. Chute Gerdeman designed two activity-driven experiences at the store.
Barbie Shanghai, designed by Slade Architecture, was the only retail store to be recognized in the 12th annual awards program sponsored by BusinessWeek and Architectural Record. The awards recognize projects with innovative architectural strategies that help businesses achieve specific goals.
The London Retail Interiors Awards recognize those who make a real difference to retailers’ performance and the 15 winners represent the best of the industry. Barbie Shanghai took the award for Best International Retail Interior.
Competition was fierce as entries this year exceeded expectations in terms of quality and quantity. On Barbie Shanghai’s Best International Retail Interior Award, Retail Week’s Stores editor, John Ryan, said “As an example of true creativity in action, Barbie is an astonishing tour de force, it not only looks good but is totally consistent with the brand values of this iconic 50 year old improbably shaped female doll.”
Chute Gerdeman choreographed the customer experience at the Barbie Fashion Stage and Barbie Design Center and also designed the interior of the Barbie Fashion Stage experience. In creating the Barbie Design Center activity and Fashion Stage show, the Chute Gerdeman design team integrated the powerful Barbie brand essence with a girl-centric point of view. Chute Gerdeman partnered with Mattel on all aspects of creating the themed experiences—crowd management, personalized staffing and attention, time sequencing, and audience participation—in addition to collaborating with the international project team to seamlessly integrate unique environments and brand communications into the larger Barbie Shanghai identity.
The BusinessWeek and Architectural Record’s awards jury, which consisted of members of the editorial staffs of both magazines, attempted to gauge the success of each project’s “business case”—a series of quantitative and qualitative measurements of building performance.
Factors considered included employee productivity, construction costs and reduced overhead, among other criteria.
The winning projects were chosen from a competitive pool of nearly 100 submissions. Winners will be recognized at an October 7 ceremony in New York City during the Architectural Record Innovation Conference. They also will be featured in BusinessWeek and in the November 2009 issue of Architectural Record.
Reena Jana, BusinessWeek’s innovation department editor and jury member, was impressed by the projects in three different areas: “One was promoting employee productivity and collaboration through design, with things like fewer sick days and higher productivity. The second was brand reinvention through architecture, which shows ways to adjust to shifting marketplaces in industries like retail and technology. Third, in this time of transition, it was impressive to see that many of the strongest entries had the larger effect of revitalizing the cities or regions in which the companies were headquartered.”
Also on the jury was Robert Ivy, editor in chief of Architectural Record. He noted the high quality of submissions this year, which he found surprising considering the economic downturn. He adds: “We were pleased to see a large number of projects in which clients and architects were collaborating to create designs that differentiated their facility, their culture and their identities from the norm.”
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