Puma is getting gritty.
The German activewear company’s new “store-in-a-box” concept store makes its debut today with the opening of a shop in Portland, Ore., and one Thursday in New York’s Union Square.
“We got too polished and became too much of a retail machine,” said Antonio Bertone, Puma global director of brand management. “We needed to find a way to make the opening of a Puma store really easy, and the concept of a store arriving in a container was born.”
It works like this: A big, red container, holding all the fixtures and furniture for the store, is delivered to the new locale. If the space is prepped, it takes about three days to set up the entire store. Then the red box becomes the checkout desk.
The space itself will “feel like a graphic, heavy loft,” Bertone added. In the New York store, which has almost 4,000 square feet of selling space, the exposed-brick walls will remain. The Portland unit, which is almost 3,500 square feet, features plain beige walls.
“We leave the existing space as it was,” said Paolo Lucchetta, architect of the new concept. “You will see a brick wall — the shell is absolutely open with no plaster or outer skin.”
Lucchetta’s Italian design firm, Retail Design Srl, specializes in designing retail concepts. He started working on the design a year ago, letting the Puma products inspire him.
“The main idea is creating a fluid space in which all of Puma’s ideas could be represented, so each store and each season will be different,” Lucchetta said. “Every store will be an interaction between the space and the products.”
Puma’s Web site served as the inspiration for the new brick-and-mortar stores. Like the Web site, the store will be divided in sections and clearly labeled with a sign that says, for example, From the Puma Archives.
“How do you bring the world of puma.com alive?” Bertone asked. “We are turning the Web site into a store, a church of Puma.”
The new Manhattan store at 33 Union Square West, sandwiched between Heartland Brewery and an office building, is the third Puma unit in New York City, joining a concept store in SoHo and a fashion one in the Meatpacking District, which carries Puma’s fashion collaborations such as its Nuala line. The Union Square store will carry a bit of everything — sports fashion, lifestyle lines, performance, footwear and accessories for women, men and children, though only footwear for kids.
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Puma declined to reveal projected sales volumes for the stores.
The company’s concept store design has not been tweaked since the first store opened seven years ago. Globally, Puma has almost 80 concept stores, and going forward all will be built from the store-in-a-box concept, and several of the bigger existing stores — including those in London, Paris and Santa Monica, Calif. — will be renovated next year.