Fashion Re-told 2019 – Retelling Retail With Printed Graphics

Client: Harrods
Sector: Interior Branding, Retail
Services: Install, Print

Working alongside one of our most prestigious clients, PressOn printed and installed a series of attractive floral graphics for one of the UK’s most exciting retail experiences: Harrods’ Fashion Re-told 2019 pop-up boutique. Building on the success of 2018, this is the second year the pop-up has run, and Harrods decided to increase the level of visual  immersion, creating a unique experiential retail space themed around an English flower garden.

The pop-up offered a range of pre-loved and donated luxury and designer fashion items, to raise money for The NSPCC, the UK’s leading children’s charity, at a venue located on Marylebone High Street. The floral graphics really transformed the space, and demonstrate how, for a temporary installation such as this, immersive design can make an unforgettable impression.

Fashion Re-told 2019 – The project:

fashion re-told 2019 entrance

Fashion Re-told was launched in 2018 by iconic retailer Harrods to raise vital funds for the NSPCC, generating a phenomenal total of £110,000. The space was the charity’s first ever stand-alone fashion store, selling a wide collection of donated clothing from some of the world’s most celebrated designers.

For Fashion Re-told 2019, Harrods wanted to ramp up the ‘experiential’ nature of the store. Using a larger retail space than before, set across two floors, they wanted visitors to feel like they were immersed in a traditional English flower garden in Marylebone. They wanted the pop-up to be ‘more than a store’, and to represent a beautiful space in which the community could come together around such a vital cause.

To achieve this, they designed an elegant floral pattern, and enlisted long-term collaborators PressOn to print a set of graphics to cover every wall and floor surface of the interior space.

The challenge:

fashion re-told 2019 stair graphics

Printing a project like this can present a number of challenges, and PressOn had to carefully consider the practicalities of producing graphics that matched Harrods’ specific brief. This involved the right selection of substrates, inks, and printing machinery to ensure that every print was uniform and perfectly consistent.

This was made even trickier by the context in which the graphics had to be installed. The various surfaces in the retail space Harrods had chosen were irregular in size, shape, and condition – this meant creating a sense of ‘flow’ between the various walls and floor spaces would be difficult.  

Another challenge with projects like these lies in allowing for all the potential subtle variations in colour gamut and production, as different materials and machinery reproduce colours in different ways; Harrods’ brief was that every variation of the print needed to be perfectly even, which meant PressOn had a complex task in ensuring the graphics were flawless.

The solution:

Fashion re-told 2019 - large format graphics

PressOn determined that four different substrates would be required for the various surfaces: U Fabric cover canvas for the walls, blockout vinyl for the lift graphics, Utack multi-surface vinyl for the floors, and Softstuff for the tension fabric frames.

With these substrates identified, we elected to use two of our cutting-edge HP printers to produce the graphics: our Latex 3600, and our new addition, the Hybrid R-Series R2000 flatbed. The colour quality of these machines is absolutely exceptional, and with expert calibration and operation our team were able to produce flawlessly consistent graphics – across two different printers.

Installation: planting the ‘flowers’:

Mannequins at fashion re-told 2019

With the graphics printed, installation was the next challenge. PressOn offer an extremely fast turnaround on installation, even for complex projects such as this – and from start to finish, the internal wall, floor, lift and fabric graphics were installed within four nights. This also included a series of ‘teaser’ and ‘reveal’ graphics for the grand unveiling of the store.

A collaborative achievement:

Installation at fashion re-told 2019

For this project, PressOn worked – once again – alongside installations specialists 3D Eye. Their team were chosen by Harrods to increase the level of immersion in the boutique – installing a pastel-pink market van (split into two separate installations) and a massive flower arch over the main entrance. The colours and designs of these physical installations blended seamlessly with PressOn’s graphics to create a unified environment, and a unique shopping experience.

This collaboration of design goes a long way to demonstrate the kind of results that can be created when retailers really think about the visuals of a retail environment; a store doesn’t only have to be a space that simply displays products – as the physical retail world becomes more competitive, providing shoppers with this kind of memorable experience will be more and more important.

A vital cause

The Fashion Re-Told 2019 pop-up ran throughout May, and we’re eagerly awaiting the announcement of how much money has been raised (check back here soon, we’ll update this page when we find out!) We’re confident it will far surpass that of last year, and will provide even more essential funding for such a wonderful charity.

The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children campaigns to protect children across the UK and the Channel Islands, and their work is so important – it’s fantastic to have been involved in this unique effort to raise money for them. For more information on the fantastic work the NSPCC do, visit their website here.

 

Harrods fashion re-told 2019 store clothes at the fashion re-told 2019 popup childrens luxury designer clothes at fasion re-told 2019
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