New Surfaces and Interior Design Concepts for Shopfitting

The ski and tennis equipment supplier Head chose for his brand showroom in Salzburg a concrete look and white shelves.

Shopfitters and interior decorators have many choices: they have more and more options available when it comes to decoration and interior design. Newly developed surfaces look like real wood, stone or concrete, but are much lighter and easier to handle. Alternatively, you may choose distinctive creations – rough looking, glossy or matt finished. Furniture, partitions or covers no longer just have to look flat and square.

Booth construction is the trendsetter. Decorative construction for retail finds many different inspirations here. Large exhibition booths are equal to temporary shopfitting projects. New materials are being used that are also suitable for bricks and mortar businesses. EuroShop exhibitors also lend their experiences in booth construction for shopfitting and decorative construction. They collaborate with shopfitters as suppliers and sources of inspiration or offer their services directly to retailers.

The vendors recommend surface combinations that are meant to make the brand presentation unique. ”Surface is Emotion“ was the slogan for instance of tendermark fine surface from Seelze near Hanover. Every brand should have its own surface – this would broaden the haptic experience during shopping. However, this assumes that customers also notice the difference to competitors. tendermark sees itself as a manufacturer that designs hand-made individual surfaces for brands. These can even be trademarked or patented as a utility patent.

Natural materials – deceptively real looking or newly created

In shopfitting, natural materials have been coveted for years. They invoke a feeling of warmth and security. In a EuroShop interview, Edmund Ostrowski, Managing Director of WVS in Bad Wurzach says:”One trend in woods is still good old oak“, besides many different types of wood. However, it is not just smooth veneers that are sought after, but also a cured and weathered look, a spalted wood appearance and rough sawn surfaces. WVS is not a carpenter’s shop, but the maker of composite material systems. What looks like wood is actually a deceptively real-looking reproduction. This also applies to concrete or stone.

Mey presents its fashion in black shelves with glossy surfaces.

A vintage look has been trendy for the past few years now. What is meant by that are signs of wear and tear on the material. New material is made to look old. Rust and matured timbers are meant to provide authenticity. Rough surfaces have two advantages: the three-dimensional structure can be seen in a streak of light and offers a special experience when touched and felt. You can either use old materials for this, which is cumbersome, because it first has to be collected and reclaimed or you choose reproductions. Reproductions are only good if they can be mistaken for the natural product. Then their advantages really pay off – aside from lower costs, there is also easier processing.

At this point, surface designers do not just want to create reproductions of nature. Now they also develop surfaces that are not available in nature. Haigis & Schultz from the Lower Saxon town of Ottendorf offers six and a half millimeter stone slabs for booth construction, shopfitting and shipbuilding. These imitations are much lighter than the original material, which can also simply be cut, cemented and bent. With a bevel cut, “stone” cubes of up to 1.20 meters in edge length are being created. ”You won’t find this in nature, but it looks great in merchandise presentations”, says marketing director Erwin Winter.

Plastic sheets – a cover that invites lots of creativity

The foundation for many novel surfaces is plastic sheets. Furniture, building components and technical equipment can be refined by using them. ”We fold the sheet over like soft cheese“, Uwe Maszkiewicz from Renolit in Worms explains the manufacturing principle. The sheet is heated and takes on the surface structure of the background. This way you can design rough wooden surfaces for the sales counter as well as three-dimensional logos for a wall.

At the EuroShop 2011 showed Renolit diversity in surface finishing with plastic sheeting.

As a partner of the manufacturing industry, Renolit is a supplier for furniture and automotive manufacturers. In 2011, it participated for the first time at the EuroShop. ”We have entered unchartered water in retail”, says Maszkiewicz. ”And we were surprised to find out that shopfitters and interior designers didn’t know about all of our possibilities.“ He says there still is the bias that this is cheaply produced furniture with synthetic surfaces. However, the times in furniture construction when you could only laminate rectangular slabs are long gone. Three-dimensional, rounded structures are also possible in store construction.

”We had a nonsense booth at the EuroShop“, says Maszkiewicz and what he means by that is: the shapes they showed had no particular function, they were only variations and a demonstration of what is possible today. The company received the ”red dot award“ for exceptional design. After the tradeshow, Renolit bid on several projects in retail. It is currently working on some projects, but there still is nothing concrete and visible yet.

Interior design with fabric panels

One entirely different option of interior design in decorative construction is something Oliver Hopert, Managing Director of Procedes Digital Printing, explains in our second interview on this focal topic. Procedes imprints fabric banners, ranging all the way to large formats. Illuminated from the front or back, this also creates many different options in interior design. The retail market has many different choices.

René Schellbach, EuroShop.de

03.09.2012

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