Sustainability in Experience Retail

We recently spent some time looking deeper into the advantages of experiential retail and why retailers need to be more flexible and adaptable in the current climate. However, this raised a pertinent issue of sustainability.

One of the biggest challenges faced by experiential retail is striking a balance between sustainability, memorability, and changeability. A prerequisite for experience retail is to be memorable and remain exciting for customers so they keep returning, but this means that shops must keep updating the experience, so their customers don’t get bored. Sustainability and changeability may seem mutually exclusive but there’s a way to consolidate these two so that the experience retail landscape does not negatively contribute to climate change.

Design evidently plays a central role within experiential retail and is subsequently an area that can have huge effects on the carbon footprint of a retail space.

We caught up with Milena from our design team this week to understand a few ways to help keep experience retail more sustainable without sacrificing innovation.

Here’s what Milena had to say:

The topic of sustainability is always at the forefront of our minds when designing spaces, new and innovative solutions are being released all of the time, staying on top of these developments is very important to us.

Here are our top 5 tips to be sustainable in experience retail:

· Collaborate! Why not collaborate with another brand to create a unique retail experience? Not only does this save on costs and environmental impact but you also gain access to another businesses’ built-in audience

· Rent across different industries. For example, reuse or rent props from the film industry for pop up shops or experiences

· Implement sustainable or recycled design material: incorporate materials like LED fixtures, rammed earth, tiles created using renewable energy and recycled fabric insulation in its buildings

· Reduce waste in store by using recycled packaging and email receipts rather than printing

· Look local! Instead of sourcing from afar why not reach out to your local community to source the extras you need

We hope that as the retail landscape continues to evolve and embrace immersive experiences this goes hand in hand with sustainability.