060 TALKING POINTS
Below Major malls such as Dubai Mall in the UAE and The Avenues in Kuwait are still thriving
Right The shopfront of Charlotte Tilbury at the high-end Dubai Mall
Te American brands didn’t really appear until the financial crisis, when all of a sudden they were very keen to expand. For our part, that’s when Zebra really changed because we’d opened an office in Dubai in 2006, with a team able to provide local design development and implementation. We were used to taking brands out of their domestic market and adapting them for international markets as that had become our USP, as had working in a unique triangular relationship of: brand; local partner; and Zebra. Tis also led us to opening more offices to better service those brands. We opened a US office in 2017 in Phoenix, Arizona – a great place to test the market and make sure we could adapt our business model for the US – then an East Coast office in New York in 2021, with an office in Miami also planned. Away from the US, Hong Kong followed in 2019 and, last year, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Te design industry has had to take a global view. London is still an attractive city,
while New York I would argue is the centre of retail, counterbalanced by Milan and Paris for the luxury retail sector. Te more creative retail trends can be found in California, in LA or San Francisco. And then you’ve got the key markets of Asia. You can’t underestimate the creative strength of Tokyo, Seoul, Shanghai or Bangkok.
Malls were still being built in the UK and US 25 years ago. Today, many are being repurposed – but not everywhere. Where a mall has a critical mass, or serves a distinct catchment area or customer group, contains the right brands, is well designed and accessible, it continues to thrive. Dubai Mall in the UAE and Te Avenues in Kuwait illustrate this well, but equally the same success is evident in smaller lifestyle malls around the world.
If malls can continue to be part of our everyday life, so can department stores. Even 25 years ago, their days were apparently numbered, yet Selfridges in London or El Palacio de Hierro in Mexico are both still very relevant, continue to grow, develop and reinvent themselves, providing new products, brands, services and experiences in a unique environment.
Te merger of retail and hospitality into essentially lifestyle has also been a key development, aligned with the rise of social media. Te Instagram moment has become huge with food and the environment around a food hall or restaurant has to be very strong. Te interior/environment has to seamlessly link with the brand values and the brand message on social media. You can’t just look at the physical – you’ve got to link it with technology and social media.
Rebalancing retail
Amid these industry changes came Covid, the ultimate disrupter. Tat altered things because for retail the internet became king. We had to respond, delivery became a key component of every new project, we began reimagining/redesigning drive thru restaurants again. Everything that we knew and that was standard was turned on its head. Once you’ve got such a big disrupter, it takes time to rebalance, but the market always bounces back, just in a different way. Tat’s where we’ve been over the last maybe 18–24 months, depending on the country. And there’s definitely been an
increase in retail work, focused around fewer stores, based on the guest experience. In the UK specifically, it would be interesting to see how many more traditional stores might open if the playing field between online and physical was level, with the true costs associated with online purchases and returns passed to customers, and the taxation system more fairly spread.
What seems inevitable is that disruption will continue. AI will definitely have an effect, speeding up the design process even further. If we think over the last 25 years, processes
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