Mood board and furnishings styles for the retail industry

We would like to talk about style and mood boards in the retail industry and how the two are related when choosing furnishings for your shop.

To present a retail project the first step is identifying the style and creating a mood board that can depict the chosen finishes, the inspirations, and the various spaces to be created, without forgetting the purchase flow.

What will we talk about?

• The importance of the mood board for a food or non-food retail project;
• Style guide for a retail experience project:
  • industrial - sporty style
  • contemporary - elegant style
  • classic - sophisticated style
  • modern - minimal style
  • soul - green style
  • ethnic style

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Why is it important to create a mood board for a shopfitting project?

When it comes to choosing your shop's style, furnishings, colours, and purchase path, it's easy to make mistakes that will create confusion for your prospect customers. We are the ones who start the shopping experience through the style of the space. We like too many ideas, too many styles and accessories but we do not know how to match them, thus losing our focus on the fitting project. As a result of this, the shop might end up lacking a common thread, a coherent style and design that can give customers the long-awaited shopping experience. The mood board provides clarity and shows how to choose furnishings and style. Through an overall representation of inspirational images and finishes, it really clarifies the style path to choose!

Style guide for a retail experience project

Let's now identify the styles that may best suit your retail project. There are so many different styles of furnishing and often their mix can lead to chaotic and un-personal environments. For this reason, it is important to identify our buyer persona, the product we are selling and the way we want to present it. Let's start by analysing the various styles we have identified, which often also coincide with real lifestyles of the target customers..

Industrial - sporty style

It is distinguished by several distinctive structural details, such as exposed plumbing and fixtures, pillars, exposed brick walls, concrete floors, and generally unfinished lime-effect materials. Given these premises, to replicate this style is usually difficult as it requires special buildings and large areas, which are difficult to accommodate in too small settings. This style matches with sportiness and more male settings very well.

Sport City is our proposal for the industrial-sporty store furniture

In general, when it comes to industrial - sporty style, the key features are the followings:

• Colour palette with dark and cold tones. The "must have" colour is obviously grey in all its shades and the mood board will be mainly focused on these tones. This does not mean that we cannot intervene with touches of very bright colours, often even fluorescent
• One single flooring throughout the store, if possible concrete floor or resin that simulates concrete. If wood is chosen, it would be better not to use a too warm shade.
• A shade that brings back the concrete on the walls as well. Suitable indoor cement paints are available on the market which, when properly coated, provide the young, dynamic industrial look that is so appealing to sports fans!
• Some architectural elements left unfinished, such as details of walls or exposed pipes, recreating where possible sports-related atmospheres.
• Abound with possibly raw or oxidised metal furnishings details.
• True industrial style requires an open space, with a wise balance of empty and full spaces and a very clear path for the customer to experience emotions related to sport, dynamism, and energy. Therefore, be careful with fragrances!

Contemporary - elegant style

This trend makes extensive use of boiserie and plaster, precious wood floors and valuable fixtures. The challenge in realising this style for shopfitting is not to exaggerate, because the risk of a "too full and heavy" effect is just around the corner, and the costs may also rise. This style is perfect for attracting the most elegant souls who feel at ease in sophisticated and luxurious environments! For this too, there are some key features:

• Use of noble materials for the furnishings (real wood, mirrors, glass, marble, leather, velvet, and precious metals).
• Wood, marble, or marble-effect stoneware floors.
• Massive use of boiserie and furniture with an original and refined look that reminds a luxury retail experience.
• Colour palette in warm shades of beige, ivory white, honey, dove grey or black without forgetting the much-loved gold.
• Details in refined fabrics such as velvet.
• Striking lamps and chandeliers with a great visual impact.

Classic - romantic style

The perfect style for all those buyer personas with a retro soul who mainly love spaces with attention to detail that transport them to fairy-tale environments, such as ancient libraries, romantic beauty centres or dream restaurants. Also for this style there are some guidelines to consider to properly address these romantic souls:

• the mood board certainly starts with a choice of soft colours, where pink and beige palettes stand out, matched with warm and richly grained woods.
• important use of classic furniture, also revisited and lacquered with more modern finishes.
• embroidered, romantic and soft fabrics placed on refined armchairs and footstools.
• vanilla and rose fragrances because the experience also passes through the sense of smell.
• wooden floors and a prelude to frames and bookcases displaying products of all kinds in the walls.

Modern - minimal style

The modern - minimal style of technological inspiration is ideal for all those who love simplicity, few objects, minimalism. The modern minimalist style, unlike the popular belief, is one of the most difficult to realise as it requires a focus on a few furnishings and colours. In general, it is a design path that merges into a mood board with cold shades with the inclusion of elements of technology. The inspiration comes from high-tech customers who need clarity and intuitiveness in their purchase paths.

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But let's see the features this style should have in a retail project:

• a relatively monochromatic range of colours with predominantly cold tones. The colours of this style are light grey and blue.
• use of a few pieces of furniture, positioned in such a way as to create a simple and intuitive but never banal purchase path.
• extensive integration of home automation and technology, and a careful study of lighting technology.

Soul - green style

This style is suited to all environmentally friendly people who love to immerse themselves in nature to feel an integral part of the planet. The experience must be all-round immersive and involve all the senses: smell with the scents of nature, visual with earthy tones, touch with the use of textures, visual impact that should tell a story and where possible taste, which must be linked to the raw materials. What are the main features of this style so tied to mother earth and nature?

• very light colour palette, with a predominance of green tones. Green light to all earth tones and shades of beige!
• privileged use of FSC^® wood and certified raw materials, in particular light oak, which provides an authentic and very bright atmosphere.
• very clear, simple purchase paths outlined by an extensive use of green plants, such as Monstera, Kenzia or drooping ivy and pothos.
• great attention to the use of recyclable and eco-friendly materials. Plastic is banned!

Ethnic - voyager style

This shopfitting style should always be designed according to the type of culture you want to recreate for a commercial project that makes you dream and travel with your imagination. This is the trend we suggest if you are thinking of spaces that pass down culture and that express it through objects, furniture, fabrics, colours. Each civilization is a multitude of colours, scents, and unique carved woods.

The ethnic style is based on a choice of great character, which certainly will not go unnoticed, and which goes hand in hand with the typical travel experience, such as the discovery of new habits and lifestyles. For a food project the ethnic style could be realised through the absence of eating tables, choosing cushions on the floor instead, or the creation of extremely private corners divided by curtains and draped fabrics. Even in the case of perfume shops, the voyager style can be expressed through a clear division of colours, references to wood and a variety of fragrances recalling open-air markets or typical Arabian souks.

The main features may vary with the change of the main reference culture, but we list some of the common ones:

• use of exotic woods, from ebony to mahogany, teak and rosewood.
• use of a lot of metal, even worked or carved.
• massive use of colours, especially red, orange, dirt, brown.
• curtains and fabrics in raffia, rope, and cotton or with characteristic prints, often handcrafted.
• extensive use of furnishing accessories in the cultural style of reference.

 Even for this style it is important not to exaggerate. Shopfitting should be a kind of journey where everything should find its place, in balance with other features.

To conclude, to create the appropriate style for a retail project, it is important to start with a mood board for inspiration and ideas. Identify a precise style that suits the personality of your ideal customers! Everything should match and be closed like a perfect circle and only then will sales be assured!

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