Client: Borders Group, Inc.
I spent five years at Borders doing retail environmental graphics on the store design team, a small creative unit within the store planning group, apart from the marketing creative group. During that time I laid hands on a lot of projects: remodeling stores, building new stores, airport stores, small format and superstores, fixture design, environmental graphics, space planning, wayfinding, signage, exterior graphics and more. The most exciting project we completed was a ground-up redesign of the superstore model called "Concept Store" during 2008-2009. Our design was a massive overhaul of everything about the look, feel and layout of the store and garnered a lot of press and won some awards. It was rolled out as fourteen new domestic superstores and a handful of small format locations, including some with our international partners in United Arab Emirates. Later, in 2011, after I had left Borders, I was brought back for a time as a consultant to design an overhaul of many aspects of the Concept Store model. Though, sadly, that project never left the drawing board, I include some of the drawings I did for that here.