RETAIL AND PRESENTATION

Dear Readers,

those who want to sell their goods to potential customers have to come up with something special. Simply presenting what one wants to sell has not worked for a long time – storytelling is hip in our fast-paced time. Those who succeed to emotionally take the viewer along an exciting consumption trip, already have the customers on their side. A furniture manufacturer from Weil on the Rhine, who has a particular affinity for architecture, does this almost perfectly and with great consistency – you know who I mean! Recently, I had the chance to assure myself that the company’s showroom buildings by Herzog & de Meuron are perfectly suited to translate furniture stories into images, (see photo above). A visit to the “World of Malls” exhibition in the architecture museum of Technical University of Munich also served to get our colleague Regina Schubert attuned to the theme of this issue, “Sales and Presentation”. At www.facebook.com/AIT.Editors.Blog! you can find out if a visit is worthwhile. From page 92 of this AIT-issue we show you how you can use impressive stagings to not only attract customers inclined to buy but also museum and exhibition visitors. Whether cheese dairy, bakery, butcher’s shop, market hall, gin distillery, wine museum, cosmetics shop or shopping mall – every outstanding design tells an individual story, which we want to share with you. It is mostly doubted that walls can tell stories – in wallpapered form, however, this could change. With exciting patterns and innovative surfaces wallpapers seem to have awoken from a deep slumber, and we present the latest designs in our products section starting on page 76. The book “Tapetenwechsel” grants an insight into the history of the wallpaper, of which we present excerpts on pages 8, 44 and 64. And would you have thought that our cover motif is a detail of the trade fair appearance of Deutsches Tapeten-Institut (German Wallpaper Institute) at the imm-cologne 2016? We hope to have struke a chord with the choice of our cover; otherwise, simply write to me – pstephan@ait-online.de!

Best Wishes
Petra Stephan, Dipl.-Ing.
Chief Editor
Architect