CASE STUDY
For the past few years, we’ve produced rotating retail displays to highlight seasonal merchandise lines at Columbia Sportswear’s Portland Employee Store. Last fall, Columbia decided to expand their store blueprint and requested our graphic expertise.
The ask: use wall and floor graphics, dimensional structures and lighting fixtures to create five distinct customer experience zones (CEZs), an enhanced footwear wall, and 20 branded fitting rooms. The timeframe? It needed to be completed by Black Friday 2024. This gave us three months to design almost an entire store, produce, and install all flat and 3D components.
Working closely with Columbia's brand experience team, our design team began concepting, material sourcing, and 3D rendering. Upon receiving design approval from the client, our 3D engineering department took over — calculating the mechanics needed to build all dimensional components, incorporate digital screens and lighting, create custom hardware, and safely suspend the hanging elements. Over the next few weeks, we printed, cut, fabricated, finished, shipped, and installed hundreds of individual components.
Unlike all of the rotating retail displays we’ve created and installed at the Portland Employee Store to date, there were far too many pieces of this project for a single early-morning installation. We also needed to ensure that the store remained open and shoppable during normal business hours. So, over the span of two weeks, our installers worked overnight to meticulously apply, build, and position hundreds of graphics and 3D components for opening day.
The five new CEZs — Mountain Hardware, Prana, Omni-Heat, Arctic, and Kids Zone — each boast unique brand color pairings and graphics for their respective merchandise. All included, the CEZs feature two wood pergolas, an A-frame brand sign, oversized 3D letters, hanging elements, custom product displays, wall and floor graphics, backlit Silicone Edge Graphics (SEGs), custom shelving and merchandising displays, digital screens, a custom fabricated hut, and more. Clear dividers, footwear shelves, shoe platforms and risers, and a 3D logo span the 45-foot footwear wall. Finally, each of the 20 fitting rooms features brand line-focused graphics, custom benches, and door numbers.
Our client was elated with the revamp and they’ve seen a noticeable boost in sales since. We couldn’t be more thrilled with the response, but we’re not done yet. We’re already working with Columbia to enhance some of the existing displays, and launch the next seasonal CEZ!
Whether it’s permanent graphics or a seasonal customer experience zone, retail projects are where we really shine as a company. Our project portfolio features brands like Crocs, Pendleton, Nike, Columbia Sportswear, and hopefully soon, you! If you have a retail project you need help producing, let’s chat.
