We start with what worked.
Every brand has a place that worked: a first store, a street, a room people came back to. We start there and learn why, then design the next place to make people feel the same way. We work as one team with the brand, so the people who will run the place are in the room from the first sketch to opening day.
Where you’ve been
Walk the stores, read the history, talk to the people who run them. Find what made the best of them work.
What it should be
The concept, the plan, the materials, the light and the fixtures, written as one brief everyone can build to.
Open it well
Architects, contractors and makers, managed to the brief and to the budget, through to opening day.
What a store or place should be and how it should feel: the idea, the format and the story.
Design, design management and fixtures through to opening, with cost discipline from the first drawing.
A senior head of store design without a full-time hire: the standards, the studio, the vendors and the team.
Four weeks, fixed fee. Every store walked: how each looks, feels and works, and what to refresh first.
James Andrew Smith
James came to places from fashion and design, by way of Milan and London. He launched visual merchandising at White House | Black Market, then spent a decade building and leading URBN’s store design studio: more than 200 one-off stores, and $46 per square foot taken out of construction cost. He has carried a mixed-use development from the zoning map into construction. Oxford Executive MBA.
He leads every project himself, with architects, engineers and makers brought in for each one.