Luxury Lifestyle, Design & Architecture blog

This former butchers shop in Barcelona has been converted into a shoe shop furnished with wooden pallets, ropes and tyres.  Spanish firm Dom Arquitectura and Rwanda-based Asa Studio renovated the narrow interior by stripping away the tiles that used to line the walls then painting over the rough plastered surface and blobs of leftover adhesive with a grey glaze. Display units made of pallets slung from the ceiling on ropes are used to showcase the Ethiopian brand's range of shoes. Tyres are hung from the ceiling by thick lengths of rope as decoration, while the ceiling is strung with extra lengths of rope and spotlights. Metal work benches stretch down one side of the store with space to hold shoe boxes underneath, steel plates protrude from gaps in the pallets on the wall to form individual platforms for the shoes and a folded steel plate stretches in front of the window to display footwear to passersby. "We had a very small place and a very limited budget,...

Gilt has developed a model of discounted sale of designer products that started a successful trend. Many other startups followed the trend in order to achieve quick success through a tried and tested formula. In fact the market has become crowded and the segment is finding it difficult to remain profitable as the growth in the market is shared by too many players.  The luxury brands are also finding that the flash sales model is diluting their exclusivity in the long run and making it that much more difficult to preserve their price integrity. The predicament faced by the luxury brands and designers was an opportunity that encouraged some young entrepreneurs to startup a new model of business online that would ensure full priced retail.  We had talked earlier about Edition01 soon after their launch and there are more startups now who are following a similar business model. Moda Operandi and AHAlife are some of the other examples that are following the full pr...