Stores we love – August 2016

Our recent Brands Behaving Differently thought piece seems to echo throughout this month’s Stores we love. With examples of online turning physical, mainstream moving into market-town boutique, even stationery brand diversifying into barista, it’s a mixed bag of great brands catering for new audiences.

Moleskine Café – Milan

Looking to expand beyond just reading and writing, Moleskine opened a two-storey restaurant and coffee house in Milan’s Brera design district at the end of July. The bottom floor features a bar serving food and coffee made with locally-roasted beans, and a gallery of notes and sketches from inventors, architects and fashion designers. Upstairs, visitors will find a more relaxing atmosphere, with comfortable couches and chairs for reading and working.

What we love:

We love that Moleskine is encouraging Time Well Spent – creating a space where visitors and brand advocates can spend time relaxing or attending regular workshops and lectures.

Everlane Fit Studio – San Francisco

Everlane recently opened its first physical store, dubbed the ‘Fit Studio’, located on the the ground floor of the company’s San Francisco HQ. This comes after years of the online-only retailer testing pop-ups and intimate open studios in the US. The flexible store will act as a test bed for the brand to experiment with different retail concepts, and aims to to offer the best aspects of online shopping – speedy checkout and freedom to browse without being targeted by sales assistants.

What we love:

We love how the ultra minimal store reflects the brand’s ‘radical transparency’ ethos and how it’s utilised a neutral palette of greys and whites, complementing Everlane’s product line and allowing them to be the focus.

Malin + Goetz – Upper Street, London

Cult New York brand Malin + Goetz has recently opened not one, but two flagship stores in London, their first outside of New York and LA. One of which is located on Upper Street, a 15min walk from our studio.

What we love:

With a wealth of experience under their belt – Malin previously worked as a beauty buyer for Barney’s and Goetz worked for Swiss furniture design specialist Vitra – the dynamic duo have a clear consciousness of modern luxury: “We consider it to be based on exclusivity of experience”, creating no two stores the same. The Upper Street location features a 19th century apothecary counter, cast-in-situ terrazzo floor and Douglas fir lattice shelving.

Tage Andersen Boutique og Museum – Copenhagen

We stumbled across this wonderful store, studio, museum and floral boutique on a recent trip to Copenhagen. Tage Andersen is an imaginative and famous Danish garden and flower artist who creates enchanting fairytale-like settings and scenarios out of flowers and leaves – it’s an Aladdin’s cave of all things beautiful, a must-see when visiting Denmark’s capital.

What we love:

A calm, serene space with real birdsong wrapped in natural floral arrangements, it’s very surreal. Well worth the 40 Krona entry fee… although we thought that very strange at first.

And one to look out for…