SUPPLY STORE
The Supply Store is an opportunity to taste, explore, smell and buy the products of Fonterra.
It is a custom-made retail experience, a place where staff and visitors can enjoy the story of Fonterra and pause to enjoy the “theatre of cheese” by sampling and the ceremony of wrapping, and taking home beautiful cheese, yoghurt and milk.
As part of our client brief to design an exhibition space for Fonterra’s new headquarters building showcasing their history, present and future, was an opportunity to design a new retail offering within the space to house Fonterra’s products.
The opportunity for the retail experience was to create an environment that was familiar to visitors, but delivered in a fresh new way.
Seeking inspiration from the industrial heritage of New Zealand dairy, strong, bold and proud while keeping it fresh and appealing with premium and contemporary design cues.
The intention was to have a very grounded space using only a small selection of materials, formed within a commercial environment with a polished concrete floor and open, but tightly gridded ceiling.
The space is a shelter, housed within a powdercoated steel frame resembling a milk shed, covered in a duck-egg blue canvas canopy.
The exterior walls continue the raw natural theme as they are clad in rough sawn timber grooved panels stained a deep ebony.
The joinery elements of counters and display shelving continue with the natural materials theme, with stone countertops, natural timber planked counter carcasses and steel, timber and mesh shelving for condiments. There is also a frameless lightbox for displaying artful cheese imagery and blackboards for specials.
The whole space is finished off with a purpose made feature brass vessel and exposed tap and pipework assembly, reminiscent of that found in a farmhouse.
All aspects of the space – from the physical environment to the branding of the store itself were designed for function with friendliness and a casual invitation to partake in sampling what Fonterra has to offer.
The Supply Store caps off an exhibition which tells the Fonterra Dairy for Life story of ‘all the way from their farms to consumers' homes’, and is unique in that at the end of their ‘journey’ visitors can purchase the end product.
Undertaken while Group Head of Spatial at Designworks - also see Awards