Redefining Retail Design & Reimagining the Department Store for a Digital Age

The emergence of online shopping has been gradually changing the physical retail landscape, already in freefall the pandemic has accelerated this decline and the demise of department stores, making people question the very concept of a department store.

Property Week asked tp bennett to reinvent a redundant department store for the future, and design an innovative department store concept to challenge people’s changing view towards physical stores vs online shopping.

Strategies for Future-Proofing Department Stores

Our concept explores the purpose of department stores, reimagining them as an incubator for renewed community interaction, taking inspiration from the ancient Greek Agora, a centre for athletic, artistic, business, social, spiritual and political life in the city.

Redundant department stores will be repurposed into a new agora – a multifunctional space that will bring back non-retail services and functions that over the years gradually lost their place on the high street. This new mix of uses will create a people-centred community, bringing purpose and joy back to town centres.

Department Stores Pioneering Change

Combining community experiences with purpose driven  non-retail spaces will encourage people to visit department stores to see art exhibitions, repair bikes, phones or watches, to leave children to play in a crèche or to sit down on a bench and read a book. They might want to meditate or pray, learn to repurpose things no longer needed in a ‘waste to want’ lab, learn to grow vegetables in an urban farm or relax in a sauna or spa.

These new experiential retail strategies will form an incubator for renewed community interaction and a catalyst for transformation towards a new hierarchy of needs and wants; an epicentre of the wider urban renewal celebrating activities deemed laborious, mundane and unfashionable in the retail-dominated pre-Covid era. Discover more about our innovative retail projects on our retail design page.

Look at our concept in detail here.