Our visit to this year’s EuroShop was a feast for the senses and a shot of adrenaline for our beloved industry. Billed as “The World’s Largest Retail Trade Fair,” EuroShop takes place every three years in Dusseldorf, Germany, where retail brands, designers, architects, and suppliers all converge to revel in inspiration and imagine what’s next in retail.
Just as shopping has evolved in recent years, the design of spaces where shopping takes place has taken quantum leaps. As leaders in the vanguard of retail experiences, Chute Gerdeman actively seeks out the newest trends, ideas, and techniques that keep our work fresh and our execution seamless. With so much inspiration on display at EuroShop, we’ve pulled together our list of themes that we saw across the trade fair, and assembled some visual examples of each to illustrate our favorites.
1. Immersion
No longer working in only two dimensions, the best experiences are multi-sensory, and activate our minds in every dimension. Surrounding the shopper with inputs, and providing an opportunity to make physical spaces a driving force for the industry, we were captivated by the wide array of immersive environments.
2. Movement
Eye-catching action and purposeful motion kept our attention and made us stop in our tracks at the show. While many activations featured digital movement, analog activity also made a splash.
3. Componentry
Like the final piece to a perfect puzzle, experiences capitalized on modularity in their designs, serving multiple functions and allowing for a variety of experiences. This trend works especially well as we constantly try to find ways to scale and adapt experiences in a variety of footprints and spaces.
4. Color
Colors exploded at EuroShop, but not only on one spectrum. Importance was placed on finish & feel, with shine, matte, metallic, and glossy finishes working hand in hand with texture and pattern.
5. Opacity
See-through and peekaboo surfaces were a major attraction across the fair, with a wide variety of creative expressions utilizing different levels of transparency and opacity as a major tool in their toolbox.
6. High-Light
Specialty lighting and architecture merged into a movement of delicate, eye-catching line work, attracting attention and literally spotlighting with highlights.
7. Live Surfaces
Screens aren’t the answer anymore—interweaving architecture and physical environments with integrated motion, content, and interactivity is the way forward.
8. Dimensionality
Flatness falls flat. Spaces and shapes with tactile, organic, and changing surfaces provided endless visual fascination on multiple planes.
The retail design roadmap is constantly changing, with disruption via sensorial stimulations. While we may have vertigo from all the immersion, we’re surely excited to see what the next wave of retail spaces entails, and can’t wait to put into practice some of the awesome inspiration we found at EuroShop!
See you back in Dusseldorf for the next go-round in 2023!