EuroShop 2023: What You May Have Missed

Design 4Retail 07 March 2023

Brand Creation

This is what happened when we attended "The World’s No. 1 Trade Fair"

In this article...
- D4R take home GOLD!
- Designing an award-winning stand
- What's next for the design box?
- We attended talks, and we talked!

After exhibiting at EuroShop in 2020 when visitor numbers were down due to uncertainty around COVID, we couldn’t have envisioned the sheer amount of footfall and engagement that we experienced last week. We knew it was going to be big, but EuroShop 2023 was something else and we were ready for it!

D4R take home the GOLD award for “Best Extra-Small Stand” at EuroShop 2023!

Something we didn’t foresee happening during our appearance at EuroShop 2023 was the potential to win an award for our booth design. That was not at least until we were presented with an ‘EXHIBITOR Finalist 2023’ award for the “Best Extra-Small Stand” category by EXHIBITOR Magazine – the only award of the show endorsed by EuroShop themselves!

This was huge news considering there were only 50 finalists from the entire show which put us in the top 3% of exhibitors at the world’s no. 1 trade fair! Little did we know (although we were quietly confident) that we would go on to take home the GOLD award a few days later following a momentous awards ceremony hosted at the Expo & Events stage in Hall 1.

The judges said they “loved the contrast of the dynamic outside and the stark interior of the stand, maximising its small space better than all the rest.”

Here’s how we curated an award-winning design box and PR spectacle…

The success of our stand at EuroShop 2023 is a testament to our creative capabilities. Armed with unique industry-insight and a talented team of designers, strategic thinkers, project managers, and retail fitters, we approached the design, development, and implementation of our stand in the same way that we approach our clients’ retail projects!

As a creative-led agency, we secured a spot in EuroShop’s Designers’ Village. With the biggest stand in this space being just 15sqm (ours was just 9sqm!), and in a location overflowing with designers and industry creatives, we knew we had to come up with a design that would make a huge impact in a small space!

Our creative studio struck upon a design concept exercising a bold and colourful lenticular façade, contrasted by a minimalist black and white interior, complete with striking typography, as a tool for best-in-class brand communication. As exhibition visitors and press contacts from all-over circled the stand to capture the impressive façade, an interior drained of all-colour to contrast the booth’s external presentation and an interactive moment in the form of a central Zoetrope encouraged the crowds to venture inside. Inciting a feeling of nostalgia for many as they cranked the handle to ‘activate’ the illusion, our popular booth, or ‘Design Box’ as it would come to be called, was one of engagement, learning, function, and, most importantly, a reflection of the D4R brand.

We invited visitors to take home a piece of D4R (although they didn’t need much convincing!) via a brand-encompassing newspaper exhibiting examples of our work, retail insight, and expert agency team, as well as a bright orange and pink tote bag which visitors of the show actively sought-out – drawing yet more traffic to the stand!

WHAT’S NEXT FOR THE DESIGN BOX?

Always looking for a way to repair, repurpose and recycle our creations, alongside considering sustainable production opportunities at the point of design, Design4Retail are also really pleased to reveal that this stand will be given a second-life following the exhibition as we will be donating the booth to Fashion and Textile school, Da Maere, in Enschede in the Netherlands. Exact details are still to be confirmed however we understand that it will be used as a fun meeting space within the school and look forward to receiving photos of the booth when it is re-installed in its new home!

We attended talks, and we talked!

Alongside members of our Trends & Insight team attending talks from industry experts across the board, we also had the opportunity to share our knowledge of the retail industry from a marketing and design perspective through our Retail Futures 2030 talk over on the Retail Designer’s stage.

MORE BUMS THAN SEATS

Perfectly delivered by our Creative Director, Andrea Robinett, the talk covered several of our predictions for the future of retail, and proved really popular, attracting a huge crowd to the Retail Designers’ Stage. This pioneering talk about the future of retail drew inspiration from our Retail Futures 2030 insight report which you can get hold of by filling in your details here, so our marketing team can send a copy over to you.

We talked a lot… and listened, too!

The conversation continued off-stage, in and around our Design Box, with our Marketing Team having the pleasure of talking to people working for brands and retailers, big and small, and the opportunity to share D4R’s ethos and library of design services through the materials on our stand – as well as the stand itself!

We’re in the process of following up on all the great conversations we had so please keep an eye out for any comms from us if we haven’t already been in touch. Feel free to schedule a meeting if you’ve got a time-sensitive project you would like immediate support with, or if you simply want to get the ball rolling for a project on the horizon… Schedule a meeting

Let’s talk.

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WHO ARE DESIGN4RETAIL (D4R)?

Design4Retail (D4R) is an agency based in Leicestershire, UK, offering a full end-to-end retail design service solution for global brands across several sectors, including beauty, sports, luxury and fashion. We design and execute stores, pop-up shops, window displays, shop-in-shops, and marketing campaigns, for brands such as adidas, Therabody, Benefit Cosmetics, MAC Cosmetics, The North Face, Roland Mouret, Christian Louboutin – the list goes on!