Our client, Perfumerías Primor, chose us to design their flagship store in Plaza de Callao, in Madrid: an incredible space of 1500 square meters. Juan Ricardo Hidalgo and Estefania Salazar's wish was that their flagship store would not look like a perfumery.
They wanted to provoke a "wow", a "I've never seen anything like it". And they gave us a blank canvas in the center of Madrid to give free rein, without filters, to our creativity.
We started this titanic project by going into analytical mode. We studied consumer insights in the post-Covid era, as well as trends in the beauty sector, retail, interior design and Primor's direct competitive environment.
We saw that this new era requires physical stores to change their purpose and be multifunctional, to adapt to the needs and preferences of consumers (who frequent them less and spend less time in them but curiously spend more) and to attract them by offering them added value.
The conclusion of this first stage of work was that, within the framework of the new normal, the Primor flagship store had to be a melting pot of experiences. A space that would offer consumers, hungry for entertainment and escape, the possibility of experiencing beauty in two ways: Fast and smart.
For which we strive to streamline, facilitate and personalize their shopping experience. In an immersive and emotional way. For which we offer unexpected experiences, in a fantasy setting.
This is how we position the flagship store as a beauty macrocenter and epicenter of beauty trends for the consumer. Because there are more than 60,000 cosmetics, perfumery and makeup items in the store.
And because there is always something new to discover. In short, we set out to create a store from another planet. Or rather: a planet in itself. To create the narrative of this new space, we moved away from the visual codes of the sector that sells an individual, vain and inaccessible beauty.
We explored this concept from a new perspective: bold, playful, direct and emotionally impactful, aligned with the three pillars of Primor: optimistic, collective and affordable beauty.
So we decided to build the store's entire brand narrative around something that unites us and makes us unique: skin. With its chromatic differences and singularities, skin is one of the pillars of human beauty.
It is a reflection of our experiences and emotions. A territory of expression of different cultures and eras. A witness to our history and a sign of the passage of time. In short, it is a symbol of beauty in diversity, of aesthetics as an individual and community expression, and of personal care as a playful and shared act.
This narrative makes the leap to space through a conceptual design inspired by the layers of the skin. And so we give life to Planet Skin. A playful, fun, colorful, organic, close, created with decontextualized materials.
A planet where the different product categories are represented in micro-worlds that, in turn, are connected by spectacular transition spaces. Primor's flagship store consists of 1500 meters.
And we can say with a proud smile on our face that we have designed and used 100% of the store's meters, thanks to an exhaustive work of creative zoning. Three of the keys to achieve this were: Squeeze the linear meters of the store, through curved designs that absorb or hide the columns.
Gaining space for storage. Each of the floors has a layer of unseen skin, between the display furniture and the building walls, in which the products are stored. Making it easier for staff to replenish products and giving them the option of having plenty of in-store stock was a priority for us.
Improve the customer's shopping experience. Through an organic and fluid design and an extensive work of functional signage and graphics in the space, we managed to direct the flow of traffic and enhance the customer's feeling of being "out and about".
