DESCENTE BLANC has opened its first overseas store in Beijing, China. The vertically movable hanger rack system, which defines the store design, is based on the idea of "incorporating movement into the space", and in particular the idea of redesigning the process by which the sales staff picks up products from the stockroom and deliver them to customers. 

While the brand's main product, the down jacket, is not inexpensive, it is highly functional and there is a significant story behind its design. The idea came from the thought that by minimizing the amount of time that customers had to wait while the sales staff went to the stockroom to pick up products, the staff would have more time to explain the products in detail. 

The ceiling space was turned into a stockroom, and a vertically movable hanger rack system was installed, so that the movement of the sales staff going to the stockroom to pick up items was replaced by the raising and lowering of the hanger rack system. We also created a moving merchandise display by utilizing the hanger rack system, resulting in a store space that changes every day. 

In this Beijing store, we introduced a motorized movable merchandise stock system for the first time. The merchandise stock, which is usually stored in the back of the store, was designed to be integrated with the sales area and made visible. Since the brand's stores in general have large stocks of products, stockrooms enclosed by walls were required for some of them. In this store, we were able to eliminate walled stockrooms by incorporating the motorized movable stock system with high storage efficiency. This stock system was designed based on the mesh fixtures we usually use at DESCENTE BLANC stores. Since there are no fixed walls, one can easily respond to the need for increased capacity by simply adding the same movable stock units in case the amount of merchandise stock increases in the future. After studying how the collection of products suspended from the vertically movable hanger rack system would look from the busy plaza in front of the site, we decided to install a vertically movable hanger system with the largest frontage and depth that had ever been used in the DESCENTE BLANC stores so far. From the plaza in front of the store, one can see how the expression of the facade, created by the movable hanger rack system and the movable stock system, changes dramatically on a daily basis according to the volume of products and the change of products at that time.