After visiting stores, students were able to use what they learned in their designs.
Retail field trips
This year’s sponsor, REI, partnered with
PAVE to challenge design students to create a new Camp department. The design
intent was twofold: to inspire the outdoor
gear and clothing retailer’s current customer base and to attract active outdoor
Millennials.
PAVE helped three professors this year
arrange to take students to REI stores so
they can see and feel the brand firsthand.
Rogovich was among them. She says it was
a great opportunity for her students to get
real-life experience in their chosen career
field before graduating.
“We were able to make a connection with
a manager at an REI store, and we did a tour
with him,” she says. “It’s one thing to be in
the classroom and think about fixturing,
but to actually go into the store and see the
fixtures themselves and the signage and
the graphics—that was a great experience
for the students. It was educational just see-
ing it and experiencing it firsthand.”
Rogovich had students research the
brand, then visit an REI store or competi-
tor’s store to examine the departments and
analyze how the store is presented.
Billy Stuhldreher, an REI store manager
in Boston, showed fixtures and details to
the students in the store. He explained how
that particular store is trying to achieve a
more open space by rearranging lower fix-
tures to the center of the space and higher
fixtures around the perimeter to improve
sightlines to departments. He also enlight-
ened the students on how a flagship store
differs from typical locations and builds
more excitement for the customer.
“The students were also very interested
in the fact that REI as a company is driven
by durability and longevity of fixtures that
used to be all built in-house and would last
for the ages,” Rogovich says.
Takeaways
“The challenge was having to go right into
three dimensions very quickly. The time
constraint is like the real world—quick
research and quick implementation,”
Rogovich says.
Students presented their findings to the
class after the field trips. Since not all students had visited the same store, the class
was able to gain insight from multiple store
visits through the presentations.
After the presentations, students were
able to do their own critique of what
worked and what they felt they could
improve upon before working on designing
individual sections within the stores. Since
it was such a large-scale project, the tim-
ing did not allow for students to design the
entire space, Rogovich says.
Also visiting an REI store as part of the
PAVE challenge were students of Maria
N. MacDonald, program director for interior architecture at Marywood University
School of Architecture in Pennsylvania,
and of Sarah Hewins Bischoff, LEED ID+C,
NCIDQ, IIDA, assistant professor of interior design at Endicott College in Beverly,
Mass.
While these three schools’ retail field
trips did not result in winners this year
(the competition attracted more than 500
entries this year), the students will benefit
from the experience in design research and
store design as they start careers in retail.
Likewise, the instructors will benefit from
the experience of leading this class project
as they prepare tomorrow’s retail designers and visual merchandisers for their
careers.
PAVE awarded a total of $19,000 to
winning students and $6,000 to schools
this year. Winners are:
STORE DESIGN CATEGORY
1ST PLACE
Katie Costa, University of Cincinnati
2ND PLACE
Jessica Li, Fashion Institute of Technology
3RD PLACE
Asa Bollvik, Fashion Institute of Technology
HONORABLE MENTION
Lora Child, University of Cincinnati
VISUAL MERCHANDISING CATEGORY
1ST PLACE
Kylie O’Keefe, University of Cincinnati
2ND PLACE
Samantha Moscarino, University of Cincinnati
3RD PLACE
Hannah Clark, University of Cincinnati
HONORABLE MENTION
Camilla Hassvik, Santa Monica College
Meisha Perrin, meishaperrin
@ retailenvironments.org,
954-241-4809, is editorial
assistant. She covers Above
& Beyond finalists, member
news, and other topics.
