A Bangalore-based store overcame budgetary constraints with the use of cardboard in its interiors.
When Anirudh Mukhedkar chucked up a job at Grey Worldwide, Mumbai, to turn to retail design solutions based in Bangalore, surrounding himself with a team of designers, he could hardly have reckoned with cutting-edge results since his big thing was the idea of the brand. “It was an opportunity waiting to be grabbed,” he says. “Stores spend so much money” — on spaces, on design — “but are mostly represented only by the signboards outside.” The message: switch signboards and you won’t even notice the difference inside.
His company, Restore Solutions, did a lot of work — it was the time of the retail boom — but, says Mukhedkar, “we sold our soul” at least initially to get the business A lot of the new work on their production agenda has since then broken the mould with its out-of-the-box thinking and use of materials, reason enough for them to be thankful to their client, BLR Knits, and their Internet search that brought the two together.
The knitwear export house with a heritage of shipping its merchandise to Europe had broken with tradition to start retailing in India, starting with but not dealing exclusively in export surplus fashion. They’d chosen their debut space, Forum Value Mall in Bangalore’s Whitefield, but didn’t want to spend too much on the retail space. Would Restore Solutions be able to offer them something that cut through the clutter of value brands without costing them a fortune?
“Fortunately,” recounts Mukhedkar, “they came to us with a clean slate”, and that included a name for the space. Unbox was rejected, and as they searched for synonyms for “irresistible”, which the company perceived as its brand philosophy, the Thesaurus threw up Rattrap “which got us all excited — it was cool but also whimsical”, as a consequence of which “the space we had to design needed to be a little quirky”.
Since the company was primarily into clothes that were manufactured and then packed into cartons for shipping, Restore Solutions thought up what at first sounds high on whimsicality and less on practicality — the use of cardboard sheets or cartons as display shelves for the store. Not true, iterates Mukhedkar. “Our experience of it is as a flimsy material,” he stresses, “but it’s sturdy enough even for packing refrigerators,” and if the quality of the layers of corrugates sheets and papers is good enough, “it should last at least five years.” And any weathering is easily fixable: just paper it over.
The next thing Restore Solutions focused on was mannequins, rejecting the unflattering ones that line most stores but finding others beyond their limited budget. “There is this saying on my notice board,” Mukhedkar quotes, “that if you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got,” and so they did some thinking and came away with the premise that they would use mannequins not for draping but for display. But they still needed mannequins, for which they sought out street artists, the kind that use wire to bend into interesting shapes such as bicycles. And Rattrap’s wire mannequins were created. “They’re all in motion,” explains Mukhedkar, “and they all hold merchandise in some way or another”, but most importantly: it was a low-cost operation, not unlike the “chandelier” created from flashlights at the centre of the 1,200 sq ft store.
Wire and cardboard may be low-cost but they’re also drab, at least colour-wise. It didn’t help that the company’s brand colour was black, part of their “understated European style”. But Restore Solutions wanted it to reflect their team’s passion that had built up the core design, and so they used swathes of red across the store, bold and bright and suffused with energy, something that said, contrary to the brand colour of restraint, “don’t take us too seriously”.
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The store was soft-launched a couple of months ago, but work on Rattrap is far from over. Coming up — it’s ready and lying in Mukhedkar’s office — is an actual rat-trap “a large one that will be placed perpendicular to the signage outside the store”. Other little design elements may be introduced — Mukhedkar & Co’s response to a design they’ve enjoyed working on for the pleasure of doing something unconventional.
Not that they’ve treated it like a lark. “Using cardboard as a choice might have looked easy but engineering it for use required a lot of R&D,” something that took 45 days, Mukhedkar says. But that’s part of what Restore Solutions does anyway. “We engage with a company’s brand positioning philosophy in a way that its personality comes through, that it allows it to engage with its customers.” Rattrap’s guideline was simple: Make it low-cost but also extremely stylish. Cut out the claptrap and Restore Solutions might actually have achieved that.
