Isetan

To create standout experiences in today’s busy retail environment, filled with attention-grabbing POS displays, brands must make space to offer customer’s something different. 

Tokyo department store, ISETAN set us an open brief to introduce new audiences to the work of Dieter Rams and his design for Braun and Vitsoe within their retail space. Their only requirement was that we give visitors an ‘immersive experience’. 

We curated and designed an exhibition that would present the extraordinary aesthetic coherence of Dieter Rams’ 1960s designs for Braun and Vitsoe through a storytelling journey, with objects on display organised to suggest familiar environments: a living room, screening room and study. The exhibition design demonstrated Braun’s historic use of exhibition structures, designed to provide the ideal conditions for the public to encounter both brand and products. 

We created an identity for the exhibition that extended the modular principle of the in-store exhibition, applying the same design logic to all visual elements used for the exhibition communications, including titling, graphics, poster, and a series of animated social media posts. 

The result is a strongly coherent end-to-end experience for visitors to ISETAN’s store, that establishes Rams’ design principles with an exhibition, identity and design assets that feel simultaneously technical, natural, historic and contemporary.