Selling vision with an edge

When Edge, the 20 year old Kerala based optical retail brand approached Kochi based design house Ahanas Design For Space, they where looking at new branding for their outlet, with a vision of branching out to the main cities of Kerala. So even though the first outlet was coming up in the small town of Pathanamthitta, the brief to the designers was very clear-- to adapt a brand language that could be taken to all metro cities and yet have stock capacity to attract hyper local crowd.

Says Navath Rahin, Head Designer, Ahanas Design For Space, “As the client wanted to adapt a brand language that could be taken to both small towns and metros, we were sure that our final design should offer the client easy flexibility in changing the display and shift between bigger volume stock that attracts small town crowd and minimal stocks for the metro cities. For this we adapted a timeless material palette that involved grey stone textured laminated walls combined with white ash wood and silver metallic highlights. And the display stands made out of aluminium and acrylic sheets are part of a seamless moveable display system made possible with 3mm inclined CNC cut grooves on the laminated walls. These grooves are carried all along the walls of the store to evoke a sense of precision and ‘EDGE’ to the store that the client wanted the customers to feel about the brand.”

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As Navath informs, the colour palette was kept simple and minimal with grey,silver, white & beige so that it could be used for a longer period of time. “We strictly didn’t follow anything trendy as we didn’t want the store to be outdated for the longest period. The client named their new brand “EDGE” and we took inspirations for our design from it resulting in a store with straight lines and strict grids that showcases the brand image,” explains Navath.

The toughest challenge faced by the team during the project, informs Navath, was to achieve precision with the moveable display system, given how the sales team at store would handle it. Several mock ups were carried out at the manufacturers factory as a process to physically understand the moveable system before execution.

“The mock-ups were also carried out with the exact lighting fixtures of the final design as the lighting had to be evenly spread,in sync with the movement of each display unit,” says Navath. The effort seems to have paid off as the store certainly lives up the brand name - Edge.

The duration of the project was five months, right from designing to inauguration.

Store Credits
Designers: Ahanas Design For Space, Kochi, Kerala.
Principle Designers - Rahin Pavithran & Navath Rahin