The pandemic redefined our relationship with touch, sending brick-and-mortar retail into a tailspin. But with people craving tactility once again, retailers are well-placed to turn their stores into high-touch sanctuaries for sensory pleasures.
Globally, people have been facing a deprivation of touch. With social interactions curtailed and a mass shift towards digitization, we’ve lost many opportunities to engage and explore our sense of touch – at least in the world outside of our homes.
Retail has been particularly affected by this. Shopping was once a highly sensory experience, with physical stores attracting consumers on the basis of touching and trying-on future possessions. Of course, this tactility was first upended by e-commerce, and further disrupted still by the emergence of the pandemic, when concerns about the spreading of the virus suddenly transformed touch into a much-maligned term.
As people sought to avoid crossing paths with infected people in the months following lockdowns, a period of touch-free retail reigned. For retailers, the focus was placed on technology as a way to reduce human contact in-store, with innovations ranging from shoppable QR codes and Smile to Pay biometrics to augmented reality mirrors. During this time – counter-intuitive to the loyalty-boosting concepts of personal shopping and customer service – ‘contactless commerce’ became a key selling point.
Although virus rates are again increasing in many parts of the world, the impulse to experience the physicality of goods is continuing to bolster offline retail. According to ICSC, half of US consumers planned to make more trips to stores during 2021’s holiday season, citing being able to touch and feel products as one of the top reasons to make the trip. ‘There are a lot of macroeconomic factors at play here. . .that could push consumers to oscillate between purchasing things online to offline,’ comments Vivek Pandya, lead analyst at Adobe Digital Insights.
Cover and above: Melbourne's Camilla and Marc store by Akin Atelier is designed as an 'homage to the sense of touch'.
A feast for the senses
With evidence showing that the materiality of products is key to brick-and-mortar growth, this presents an opportunity for retail designers to experiment with how they engage customers’ senses. Typically, sensorial retail would hinge on sight and touch, but more recently stores have been catering to our senses of sound, smell and taste, with curated soundtracks, signature brand fragrances and in-store cafés fast becoming part of the retail offering.
As Mark Purdy, managing director at advisory Purdy & Associates, writes: ‘The retail experience at its best should be a richly varied sensory experience: the opportunity to taste, smell, and touch products – whether that’s freshly-baked bread, vintage wines, or newly roasted coffee beans. This would seem to present a major hurdle to the digital world of contactless commerce.’
In London, grocer Spring-to-Go provides a touch-based food-shopping experience.
For quality produce grocers, like Alimentari Flâneur in New York and Spring-to-Go in London, tapping into the lively self-serve format of Mediterranean food markets can be a creative way of reintroducing – and rehabilitating – touch back into food shopping. During the pandemic, supermarkets became places for function as opposed to enjoyment, pausing tastings, stigmatizing ripeness-testing and replacing loose produce with individual packaging. Now is the time for grocery stores to embrace the textures they offer, positioning these, as Purdy says, as an antidote to tech-driven touchless store formats.
Food and drink are inherently sensorial, but retailers with less tactile products on offer can use the interiors of their spaces to inspire touch. While fashion garments themselves offer plenty of materiality, spatial designers like Akin Atelier are now embedding texture into the store design itself.
For the studio’s Camilla and Marc store in Melbourne, it used materials such as plaster, travertine and pearly onyx to make the branch of the womenswear brand a ‘homage to the sense of touch.’ ‘By championing hand-craft and specialist trades, the store creates an opportunity to experience the interiors as a series of surfaces and textures,’ explains Akin Atelier. ‘It is not until the visitor is immersed in the store, that the diversity of material application, and the relationship between space and texture becomes apparent.’
Casa Cucinelli is a private client shopping experience by Brunello Cucinelli that has been compared to stepping into the Italian designer’s home.
Living room retail
Safety is still a key factor in the retail experience, especially for those who remain vulnerable or concerned about rising virus cases. So, even though these retail touch museums will be an attractive proposition for the sensorially-starved, one way to ensure these spaces remain safe is to redesign them as private, invitation-only enclaves. ‘Retailers should consider elevating the in-store shopping experience by introducing reservations for more intimate and safe physical shopping experiences,’ Rebecca Robins, Interbrand’s chief learning and culture officer, tells Raconteur.
By designing invite-only stores as sanctuaries of comfort, we can expect such spaces to prioritize warm colour palettes, cosy upholstering and fully stocked fridges – essentially achieving a similar ambience to a person’s living room.
This is the concept behind Casa Cucinelli, a private client shopping experience by Brunello Cucinelli that has been compared to stepping into the Italian designer’s home – albeit a shoppable one. The space applies the designer’s aesthetic to a classic New York apartment, complete with a library, walk-in wardrobe and pantry stocked with Italian produce. Strictly by-appointment-only, the showroom demonstrates how retail spaces can achieve customer intimacy by giving the impression of dropping into a friend’s place, with the freedom to touch, feel and eat their way around the apartment.
Like the Camilla and Marc store, sensual materials play a big role in encouraging people to feel at home in the high-touch environment, with special features including a hand-woven silk carpet and kitchen marble sourced from Michelangelo’s quarry.
Retail designers can also take note from private members’ clubs, which are renowned for their premium brand of cosiness that keeps members happy, fulfilled and physically snug by simultaneously targeting all five senses. Soho House is known for its grasp of this, and as a result has launched its standalone Home Studio in New York. Reflecting the interiors of its global clubs, the store not only encourages people to feel their way around its range of home products, but chat to an in-house interior design consultant and smell and taste the seasonal produce and flowers from its ‘member market’ – a rotating showcase of the businesses of local club members.
For Interbrand’s Robins, these spaces not only offer exclusivity but also an element of theatrics. In time, this could make the retail sector synonymous with the rehabilitation of touch and texture and represent a counterargument to the advent of technology-heavy, touch-free retail. ‘Certainly, experiential spaces are central to creating a reason for stores to exist.’ she continues. ‘They are a stage for products and services.'
