Luxury Design Workshop – Bridging the Developments of Luxury Retail
Written by Chahat Goenka, Masters in Global Luxury Goods & Services Management (MGLuxM) student. SP Jain School of Global Management – Class of 2018.
With the advent of the globalisation of luxury brands and stimulated demand across nations, the biggest challenge that retail faces today is the establishment of augmented customer engagement. Luxury symbolises exclusivity and exquisite experience. As a result, the experience offered in a retail store pursues top notch comfort and customer engagement.
To bridge the requisites of futuristic developments of luxury retail, a design management & thinking course was conducted for the students of the luxury management course by Mr. Stefano Magistretti. Design management is a creative tool to link design with innovation, technology, management and aesthetic, whereas design thinking is a solution centric approach used by businesses to reiterate and reinvent their procedures to optimise the meanings and values of ideas proposed.
Triggering the right-dominant brain into channelling the creative side, the class activities engaged the students in learning futuristic developments with strategic and exclusive innovations that helped them hone their design management skills. Classroom learning involved envisioning and redesigning the prospects in the luxury retail space to troubleshoot the current problems and was further aimed to amplify customer engagement.
The various suggestions put forth by the students marked the hypothetical evolution and idealistic views of a luxury retail showroom. They included propositions like creation of a car-dome shaped test centre to entice aspirants of a luxury car brand, formulation of a virtual inventory control system for leading couture houses, display of a virtual runway across showrooms and flagship stores to intrigue fashion victims, technology advancement with creation of sensory retail trial rooms for comfort and accuracy of the feel, customisation and personalisation of iconic handbags and apparel to redesign and amplify the association of the product with the owner, seasonal preference modifications, business expansion ideas and transformation of visual merchandising.
Collectively, the course was wholesome and fostered creative knowledge and thinking along with interaction and pragmatic idea adoption and problem-solving. It brought about collaboration of different minds and creation of a corporate ecosystem within the classroom by integrated efforts of students within different groups. This practice enables the students to develop higher-order fundamental creative skills alongside practicality and trends to think beyond fundamental retail propositions.
About the Author: Chahat Goenka (MGLuxM’18)
Chahat Goenka is a MGLuxM Student with SP Jain School of Global Management. She comes from a Chartered Accountancy background and has had a flair for luxury since inception. Her ardour for writing began in her school days. Chahat’s hobbies include dancing and painting and she has received accolades for them all throughout her learning life and has also bagged national level gold medals for two of her art works.
You can get in touch with Chahat at chahatgoenka95@gmail.com
