Retail Design NOW!

Compliments of Interior Design, by Teresa Kruszewski

I've been a member of the International Interior Design Association (IIDA) since 2007 after I passed my NCIDQ exam. Recently, I started volunteering for the organization, and soon after became a co-chair, along with Heather Kane of Pallas Textiles, for the Retail Forum. It's one of ten specialty forums, each focused on a particular market, whose goals are to enhance its members’ professional experience and advocate for better design and greater expertise in the field by planning two events per year offering continuing education units to attendees.

Our inaugural event held on Tuesday, March 27, 2012 was a smashing success! It was an engaging conversation on the changing culture of retail and the built environment with visionaries who are changing the world of retail design. Moderated by Annie Block, Articles Editor at Interior Design, the event featured panelists David Ashen of d-ash design whose recent work with Godiva has gained international acclaim, Faris Al-Shathir and Gregory Sparks of Boffo whose Fashion's Night Out collaborations became the talk of the town, and Diana Revkin, Managing Retail Director at TPG, who shared her work at Eataly. Our host House of Bumble was an amazing venue with catering worthy of the amazing crowd!

To see some of the evening’s highlights, go here.

The 2012 Floor Focus Vision Awards, Retail Style

Photo by Grey Crawford

We’re pleased to report that our design for Bloomingdale’s Santa Monica took home the Retail category prize in the 2012 Floor Focus Vision awards.

This will be our fifth (!) award for the Santa Monica store. In 2010, the project won First Place in RDI’s International Store Design Awards in the New or Renovated Specialty Department Store category and an Honorable Mention in the Department Store category in Chain Store Age’s Retail Store of the Year Design Competition. In 2011, Bloomingdale’s Santa Monica was recognized by the A.R.E. Retail Design Awards with the Grand Prize in the Specialty Department Stores over 25,000 square feet category, and it also took home First Place in DDI’s 2011 Portfolio Awards for the Best Designed Store of the Year.

The team, which included Edward Calabrese, RDI, Senior Associate, Creative Director; Marian Crawford, IIDA, FRDI, Senior Associate, Project Director; George Winsper, Assoc. AIA, Associate, Job Captain, 1st Floor; and Alex Mai, Job Captain, 2nd Floor, are probably a little exhausted from being congratulated so many times. 

The award carries with it a prize of $2000, which Mancini•Duffy/TSC plans to donate to God’s Love We Deliver. In 2012, the inaugural year of the Vision Awards, our project for Fitzpatrick, Cella, Harper & Scinto took home the Grand Prize, which carried a prize of $4000, which we donated to Americares in the wake of the devastating earthquake in Haiti.

Skip Lunch Fight Hunger

Mancini•Duffy/TSC is thrilled to be participating in City Harvest’s Skip Lunch Fight Hunger for our third year in a row. In the words of City Harvest, “Each summer, thousands of New York City children who depend on school lunches the rest of the year may face hunger – Skip Lunch Fight Hunger raises funds to provide those children and their families with food, by asking New Yorkers to donate what they would normally spend on lunch to help feed our city’s hungry.” We’re further thrilled to join the august company of so many of our clients in this endeavor – go here to see the teams contributing, or here if you'd like to do us the honor of joining our team.

The event will run a full workweek this year, from May 14th through May 18th, in honor of its tenth anniversary. We'll be focusing our fundraising efforts on that Wednesday – and so that no one faints from low blood sugar, Mancini•Duffy/TSC will be buying everyone pizza that day.

Starbucks Times Square gets an A.R.E Award

Photograph by Ari Burling.

In the 2012 Association for Retail Environments’ Design Awards program, Starbucks took home an In-Store Communications Award in the Individual Element category for the Times Square flagship redesign. Mancini•Duffy/TSC worked alongside Starbucks’ team on this 3,000-square-foot location.

In the words of the A.R.E., “The Times Square Starbucks flagship makes customers feel like they are backstage at a Broadway show. Stage lighting and set backdrops help create the look, while nine-foot plasma screens present Twitter and Facebook posts made from within the store from customers in real time. In addition, a photo booth features two touchscreens where customers can take pictures and beam them to screens or save them as souvenirs. The end result is a multimedia-driven way of connecting the company’s coffeehouse customers socially.”

As of early 2012, we've completed seventeen projects for Starbucks across the country, with another twenty-five currently underway by our hardworking Mancini•Duffy/TSC Starbucks project team. Congratulations to our team on the Times Square project, which included Carlos Carrasco; Jacqueline DiBernardo; and Ira Sanchick, AIA.