Design and the retailer

With the promise of more and more retailers trading up and the increasing proliferation of speciality shops, it seems that the designer may be just coming into his own. Interior Design International, held at Olympia in March, claimed record numbers of visitors to its exhibition — a claim which was endorsed by a number of exhibitors to whom RDM spoke. And the conference held alongside it, “Tomorrow's Interiors”, had its shops and stores' seminar well attended; among the delegates from design houses and product groups were names like Marks & Spencer, Macdonalds, John Lewis, Littlewoods, Maple and Cadbury‐Schweppes. Other exhibitions in the offing include Shopex, to be held at Olympia from 18–22 May. The publicists have forecast a bumper exhibition, and claim to have some 220 exhibitors lined up. That's 55 up from last year's showing, when RDM counted something in the region of 165 companies. Of last year's number, around 75 have dropped out this year — or if your prefer it the other way, 90 exhibitors have chosen to stay on. The fact that Shopex has been brought down to London's Olympia has led to speculation that this could be a good thing for visitors from home and abroad. Last year, it was said that Birmingham was simply too decentralised, especially for the foreign visitor, and that most of the good examples of design and shopfitting were in the London shops anyway. The exhibition has a range of participants from the fields of shopfitting, design, display, point of sale, security, lighting, business machines, merchandising and allied products. It is interesting to see how many exhibitors are in the field of computers, cash registers and EPOS: Anker Data Systems, Associated Business Machines, Cash and Security Equipment, Chubb Cash, Compucorp, Decimo, Electronic Cash Registers, Geller Business Equipment, Gunn Electronic Cash Registers, Hugin Cash Registers, MLM Computers, NCR, Norfrond, Norman Pendred Cellgrave, SI Design Studio, Sanyo Marubeni UK, Shilglade Retail Systems, TEC UK, Transaction Data Systems. It will also be interesting to see what the shopfitter and designer has to offer the retailer today, faced as he is with a shrinking market. The consumer's pocket is emptier than ever before, and the major multiples have already absorbed most of the growth possible from squeezing out the independent. That the element of design will also play an increasingly important part in retailing was also evident from the ICSC 5th Annual Conference, also held in London in March. In the seminar entitled “Shopping centre response to the need for a better quality of life”, we heard how the consumer has become more discerning and demanding, and how we have to give her a more enjoyable, attractive and socially useful shopping centre; one that is well‐designed, convenient and inclusive of good services, eating areas and facilities like nurseries and libraries. From the same conference came a very interesting talk by Rodney Fitch of Fitch & Company, the design consultants, on the subject of “Graphics, signs and mall furniture.” This speech is reported below; we also present a version of the paper on design by David Calcott of John Michael Design Consultants, presented at the “Tomorrow's Interiors” conference.