Amazing Retail Designs
Retailers across North America are upping their game, enlisting A-list design firms from inside and outside the cannabis industry to stand out and to keep customers coming back for years to come.
While some of the following stores reside in well-established markets and set the bar high for competitors, others operate in newer markets and act as ambassadors for the entire industry.
Marijuana Venture spoke with the leading designers behind many of these retail stores to get insight on the design decisions and why they work in their respective markets.
Velvet
Martinez, California
When the owners of Velvet produced an initial design concept and a finalized logo, the only color featured in the logo was purple. But while the color purple certainly conveys an image of velvet, it’s typically too dark for retail design, says Gi Paoletti, the principal of GP Design Lab. So she decided on a more neutral tone of beige for the larger sections of the fixtures and outlined them with the logo’s purple and a complementary lime green.
“So you get these little bits of color throughout the whole space that are super subtle, but I think that also makes it so the beige isn’t so beigey,” she says.
Paoletti worked with a metal artisan to produce the large, backlit, stainless-steel V hanging over the sales counter. She also designed the fixtures at the store and included several moveable display cases that can be used to rearrange the floor layout or monetized to promote a specific brand. Velvet’s location also has large, rounded windows that curve around the front of the store, so Paoletti installed seating along the wall.
And to define the lines leading up to the sales counter? Velvet ropes were sort of a no-brainer.