Award-Winning Store Design and POP Projects

There were 160 registrations from Argentina, Austria, Brazil, Canada, Czech, France, Germany, Hungary, Netherlands, Russia, Slovakia, South Africa, UK, USA. Because of the time difference Australia, New Zealand, Greater China and Japan get the recorded version.

Colourful and fresh

The Retail Design Institute’s International President Cynthia Hirsch presented showcase of design winners of the retail industry’s best work, including exciting examples from the Institute’s 49th Store of the Year honorees. Showed pictures of  the latest and most creative stores of  Venice, Montreal, Seoul, Pittsburgh and New York.

The winner of the Innovation Award for Visual Merchandising was the Miami pop-up store of Psycho Bunny. The temporary pop-up shop arousing imagination with Psycho Bunny signature popart brand experience. A display wall of popart, playful and mischievous lifestyle that Psycho bunny embraces.

Stephane Bernier director AEdifica of Design Studio, award winning panelist of the webinar said that they were lucky to cooperate in the first set up of this brand first physical store. Psycho Bunny so far was active in wholesale and online selling and had limited understanding who the customer was. So it was a real partnership to create something new. It became young, brave and colorful, fresh and new, agile and fast, based on popart which was liked by the brand and by the shoppers as well. It opened space for new markets with new demographic profiles. After this first test shop the brand opened 28 other pop-up stores in the U.S.

The Store of the Year Prize winner is the Cadillac House in Shanghai, receiving the Innovation Awards of Architecture, Customer experience and Digital information.

Cigars in trunk displays

Ryan Brevda, member of the Shop! Board of Directors, director of Ryan Scott Displays presented the winners of the OMA Awards. First and oldest POP competition Outstanding Merchandising Achievement (OMA) was organised by POPAI in 1958.

The installation was designed for Davidoff AVO Unixpected Trunk Cigar launch by Great Northern Instore. The biggest challenge was the narrow budget so instead of real trunks they had to use corrugated ones. Still both retailers and shoppers like the idea. This display became the winner of the Specialty Retailers and Services category semi-permanent POP Award.

Tradition and AI

Leo van de Polder, global development director of Shop!, previous general manager of POPAI Benelux presented the winners of the Shop! Global Awards. Only the winners, gold medalists of the local contests can enter this contest so it is also called the Oscar of the POP industry.

He choose to introduce a specialty store too. Henrik Andersson, CEO of Instore screen LLC presented in details the digital transformation of the traditional Oak Farms stores. All print communications were replaced by digital screens and signage. The biggest challenge was to find the right size screens for each functions. There are built in cameras analysing the shoppers behaviour. This caused problem only in Europe because of the GDPR laws.

The speakers emphasiezed that the this year Awards of both organisations are now open for entries and they are looking forward to receiving the new entrants soon.

* POPAI, from 2015 named Shop! is an international organization of the Marketing and Retail industry which headquarters placed in Chicago and Hollywood Florida, representing nearly 2000 local offices. Hungary joined with the POPAI Hungary Association in 2003, which has since then been a nonprofit professional, educational, research and knowledge transfer organisation active mainly in the FMCG sector. Read more: popai.hu