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[email protected] Hi, I'm your host, Lewis, and this episode of Talking Shop I'm joined by Gemma Rooz and Xavier Shariff, founders of Design Agency StudioZag. 15 years, they've shaped how global brands like IKEA shop in the physical world. We discussed a shift toward narrative-led retail, the importance of finding the why behind every physical experience, and how they balance bold aesthetics with the commercial realities of the high street in 2026. Hi, Gemma, Xavier, welcome to Talking Shop, thanks for joining us. Hello. So to start, perhaps you can tell us about yourselves, your career journeys, and yeah, how you started StudioZag. Do you want to take that one? Sure. Yeah, so Gemma and I, we were at Art School together at Central Simartons, both studying creative, course, creative degrees, so Gemma studied fashion design, I studied product, so really like designing and making from learning how to design and make. And we were working in the industry, freelancing for brands, building physical things, making things happen. And we saw this gap really for both creative and production to come together in one place. Like great ideas coming from like big agencies, great quality production coming from production houses, but very rarely the two together and often lost in translation between the two, because there's ultimately control of the budget and one of the missing. And we started our studio with that in mind and with that kind of mission to have, like show, stop and creative and production all together. And we are still doing exactly the same thing today, just on a much bigger, more ambitious scale. You know, our goal is always to just bring that vision, that brand vision to life and like come up with ideas that tell brand stories in physical spaces. We cotton onto this idea of bringing wow to brand experiences quite early in our career. And that's really been a driving force for studios at how can we make someone stop and say wow. And how can we pull them into any sort of brand experience. I always say to the team wow is the word you say when you're stopped in your tracks. It captures a whole range of emotions, surprise, disbelief, delight. For us it's about impact and impression and it's about making extraordinary. And that's really been the guiding principle that underpins everything that we do from creative concepting right through to how we finish the screws on the smallest details of the work that we execute. We always aim to wow and that's what keeps us looking forward and trying to figure out what does wow look like in the future. Amazing. I guess, you know, just in the practicality of that, what some of the work maybe you have done with retailers. If you can't name specific names, that's fine. But just in terms of general concepts, it is say pop-up, experimental experiences, is it more of their improving their store layout and then general estate. What's kind of the scope of what the guys do? Well, it starts with wow. So we call ourselves a brand experience agency and that spans a number of different kinds of projects. We became famous first of all for Windows. We're the studio behind your favourite shop Windows, according to WGSN. And from that our whole ethos of like how can we tell a story in seconds. That was sort of our training ground for that philosophy and then that moved into pop-ups and experiences which has now evolved into events also. So big bang, brown, events to make unforgettable moments for our clients. We also do store design, but we largely work on strategy and concept of flagship stores for brands. So people don't come to us for boring. They come to us because they want something exceptional. When we first started doing store design, I was a little bit nervous of it actually because I'm a fashion designer by training. I am not an architect. We have architects on our team. And I absolutely know how to tell a story through a space. But I was nervous of like the permanent of a store design. But actually we found that clients were coming to us because they wanted something that had the theatre and the spectacle and the narrative of the kind of work that we were doing in the temporary space. And of course when that was the brief, absolutely where the people to go to for that. And now as we matured as a studio we're 17 years in this year. We have a team of experts who are very well versed in designing stores across all sorts of formats, types, brands. But the bit that makes my heartbeat is what's the story and how can we bring it to life in a way that's exciting, memorable, gets people engaged and talking about your brand? What's the secret behind getting those while moments in the store? Is it joining up the stories and making it fit with a certain idea? Is it sometimes something that's just very attention grabbing in terms of what we haven't seen this before? What are those things that make a great experience inside a store or pop up, etc? Lots of things. I think singularity of vision is really important. Being super clear on the story that you're trying to tell and who it's for and then expanding that out in lots of different ways so that you're still communicating the same thing, but via different mediums or different expressions. So a good example would be the IKEA Husser Fractor pop up space that we designed and built in collaboration with Mother. And that had such a strong singular vision that was about taking the iconic Fractor bag and reframing it in a luxury store context. But all the different moments throughout helped us bring the Fractor bag to life in totally different ways. So we went deep into the woven texture of the bag made this checkerboard pattern that was on the carpets and the walls, the rustling texture of the bag made an ASMR tunnel moment. We had an authentication station to so people could bring their old Fractor bags and get them authenticated. You could get it personalized, it's like going in on the core message or the core idea and then expanding out of it with different creative executions I think makes a really successful experience. What was that process like, as you say, when you're working with brands? How do you start to finish what's the conversations like, are they coming to you? This is what we have an idea of what we want to do or is the mission purpose like we want to bring attention to this. What's that dialogue like and the process coming towards the final solution and what you've come up with and say great experiences. It totally depends on the needs of the client and the brief so we run the creative studio and the production house and we work with our clients in quite different ways depending on their ask. Someone could come to us and say I want to launch this product, can you help? They could come to us with a sketch of a space or an experience and it would be our job to make that real for them. Many different ways, it depends where they're at in their process and what support they need. I think from my side, as a general example, it depends on what the project is, what the brand is, how mature and develop the brand's team is, whether you're working with a creative team or with a marketing team or all those things. One thing that we do at Studio Zerg is we help our clients define that brief often so that we can go, we can peel it back from tactical brief to strategy so we can get to the tactical brief and something that we observed often is that we're not ready to start working yet. We might need to peel back a few layers and figure out the why before we get going. It can show up in lots of ways, it can be very, very prescriptive, which is fine in our production studio. If it's production only, we would call it, it can be very prescriptive, we want to make a big purple and bag.
or whatever, or even more prescripted, you might get a technical drawing, but often and more often for us and the value that we add is it's a little bit looser and we need to kind of craft that brief in that direction with the client in a trusted relationship that we've often built over years. They're not quite sure what the what is going to be and so we need to figure out the why we're doing it, the who we're talking to, what the audience is in order to make sure that while we're in that creative process or that production process, we've got really, really clear strategic guide rails to follow and these are the questions that you're asking yourself so that by the time you're showing to a client or they're showing it to their CEO, there is answers to all the questions that we need and we can move that project forward. If you don't have that, it's a much more difficult process and over the last 17 years or more, the ones that go a little bit more rocky, the projects are a little bit more often you find that it's because we didn't collectively either we or the brand or both of us didn't figure out that YP certainly on because if you have that you have an answer to all of the questions down the road. But it is probably also worth mentioning, it's definitely worth mentioning, we work with a really broad range of types of teams, you might have a visual identity team within a brand that is super creative, they've got 3D, spatial, architects, graphics, you might have a team that has absolutely no creatives in it and they're just, well not no creatives but they're not, they don't have any creative responsibilities and you're really partnering with the team as they're in-house creative and everything in between, you might have a bit, they might need you because they're at capacity, brands, projects just keep getting piled on, a big brand, you know, might have 20, 30, 40, 50 projects on their play and you're just doing two of them, you know. And so we fit with our brand partners in different ways. So yeah, finding the Y is so important, I was just wondering what are some of the other maybe common mistakes or just issues that brands have when coming up for these experiences in terms of maybe, you know, with brands that you've worked with and then you've helped correct them or just what you see in retail today, what are some of the common mistakes that maybe say don't lead to those and have intended results? Yeah, I mean, I'll go a little bit, Gemma, I'm sure we'll have more. Probably trying to do too much is one big one. It's like, you know, there's a, I think it's partly to do with where we are as a society and the amount of information and creative that we're looking at all the time, people want a little piece of everything and we've seen so many phases of that, you know, kind of like faddy phases of like, oh, we want to do digital interactive, we want to do moving, we want to, you know, all that sort of stuff. You know, how many times have you had conversations about smart fitting rooms, you know, iPads in the toilets, whatever it is, you know, and really like they are often just gimmicks and if you don't have, you know, we're back to why, if you don't have the why, like why are we doing this? So that's one and I think trying to shoehorn in things that you saw and liked is poor, often a poor decision because it's like I saw something that was in brand X and I like it or in experience, why and I like it and I want it. It's like, okay, does it answer the questions that we're trying to ask? Does it keep, does it connect with the audiences that you're trying to connect with? Does it build the communities that you're trying to build? If the answer is no to those things, then we should really question what we're doing here and there is definitely sometimes a bit of a trend towards that now, especially as like creative and inverted commas has got easier for lots of people to access with like the rise of artificial intelligence and blah, blah, blah, but ultimately is it doing the job? You know, is it is it doing what you want it to do and do you know what you wanted to do? Yeah, I'd add to that, knowing your audience is really important so that you can craft the story and the experience in a way that speaks to them and also thinking about the experience not as one moment in isolation, everything that we do now is designed for multiple audiences. So there's the people who are going to come and experience it first hand, there are primary audience, then there's all of their audiences who are going to consume that content via their, the content that they share and then there's the sort of LinkedIn audience. We consume a lot of brand experiences through LinkedIn these days, which is a bit sad, but true. It does give us, you know, a finger in the ear, easy view on what's going on everywhere, things like shop drop daily, that sort of thing, which are obviously more the professional photos and the story as per the brand intended it. And I think if that doesn't, isn't cohesive with everything else that the brand is putting out there and it's not part of a bigger brand world, that's when it starts to fall down. You know, there's a conversation around global versus local and how much autonomy each market has and absolutely things do need to be made relevant for the regional audience, but they also need to be globally cohesive because now we can see what's happening in China. We can see what's happening everywhere all the time and it can start to feel really fragmented and confusing for the customer if those don't add up to one big story. Yes, really interesting about you say that it's a many different audiences. I guess, naturally, when I think of these things in my mind, I'm thinking of the consumer that's going to visit and touch feel, experience, whatever it is, but how much would you say emphasis is placed also on, you say, when it's being shared digitally and how that comes across. I guess you can't weigh one more than the other, but if one works well for one but not the other, how would you mitigate that and where does the end decision lie? I would say for years we've had, we need an Instagram moment in a brief and often that's sort of a corner or a wall or a pocket and now it's like expected that the whole experience will be filmed start to finish. When they butt heads, I'm not sure that they do necessarily butt heads. The kind of work that we like to create is visually impactful and we need to think about strong sight lines, clear hierarchy. We need to direct people through spaces in a way that feels intuitive and enticing rather than signage heavy or whatever. That approach inherently photographs well, I would say, harder when you're not in an immersive environment and when you're in, say, pop up in the middle of a mall or something that might not travel quite as well because you have that clean owned space. I guess it's a little bit about, if one had to win, maybe if it is a hard retail environment and it does need to work as a selling space, it wouldn't make sense to allow the shareability of it to override that and that might be a mistake. We don't work on loads of those spaces but in a more hard retail environment, we'll often work on them adjacently. It would be a mistake to make it all about filming and not about selling if it was about selling but in a more brand experience environment, it's often the experiences, often outweigh the memories that you're creating, the shareable moments, the feelings, all that sort of stuff. I guess the other thing that popped to my head was sometimes it's about collective experiences and bringing lots of people together and you need to balance out how much someone's going to have their phone out between how much they're going to actually be enjoying it. It's true, I would say at the moment, that how something photographs and is shareable is pretty high up in the hierarchy of importance of a brand experience but it doesn't mean that you can get away with it being a bad brand experience, it still has to have meaning, people have to want to share it because it was good, it has to smell good, taste good, be fun and otherwise you're in a competitive market and you won't cut through. I think you touched on something interesting there, that idea of meaning is coming through more and more and moving away from I need a cool photo moment, I need to change the way that someone feels, it's really this experience.
And the way that I see that working is through interaction and engagement and that's obviously something that can't be replicated digitally or can't be shared in quite the same way. So creating much more intimate personal moments within an experience where a customer can interact, get a surprise, get a reward and that is what I think builds meaning in a really personal way that is quite different to that photographable. I was going to ask about creating that experience, what's the key to that? You know, we've got, you can have physical interactive screens or not. It can be a simple product, but what's the key to creating those great experiences? I guess it's a finding those moments where they create a meaning to whatever the intended purpose was of that experience and that can be found in many ways. How does a brand or retailer, if they were looking for inspiration and doing that, how do you find what that meaning is? Is it looking for, say, if they're trying to launch a new product, for example, is it finding what the why behind the product and what problems that solves? Is it more of the connection that maybe the brand's bought, like, built up in terms of its previous products and work and still having that feeling in consumer? What's the key to say, finding what makes their thing special to the consumer? Yeah, it's a good question. It can be different depending on the brief. I think both of the examples that you gave are really relevant. We look to research with depth the brands that we're working with and find those little nuggets in the archives and the history that support whatever they're doing in this moment. For me, any sort of experience needs to be very closely aligned with whatever the story we're trying to tell is, so if it's a product launch, I can't think of an example of a project launch. If it's the example that I was giving with I gear and the bag, it's finding so many different ways to bring that story of that product to life, but in multi-centrily different experiences that still bring you back to the product because you asked earlier about why some experiences don't work and experience is better than no experience generally, I would say, but an experience that's just kind of plonked in and doesn't relate to the brand narrative or the product narrative or the reason for being, it's not working as hard as it could be. I kind of wanted to ask on the back of that and say creating, finding those key things. For retailers with maybe from a smaller size and don't have as great as budgets, maybe other bigger brands, is that necessarily a barrier to finding that and if not what are the best ways they can maybe go about creating these meaningful experiences but with a kind of budget-friendly approach, I guess. I think tapping into community can be a really powerful tool there, so those smaller, more independent retailers, who do they know, who could they bring into their store, who could run a workshop or bring like a bespoke bit of tailored product or something to offer people something unique, people want unique and personalized things these days and especially people who are shopping in independent local boutiques, they're not looking for something that you can get online, they're looking for nobody else has this. And so I think tapping into that is potentially quite a simple relatively cost-effective way and you're also then tapping into the network of whoever is in your community and broadening your reach a little bit. That's one idea. I think right now people want authentic, like as Gemma said, unique experiences, so these independent retailers as we're saying are like brands or shops or whatever it is, they have an opportunity to tap in because what they are is an edit, especially if they're selling multi-brand, they're an edit, and so they can create their own experience which for a certain type of customer is like exactly what they want, they want to go in, they want it to smell and feel and taste and however they want, they want it to be like their living room or whatever. And so I think they have an opportunity and to stand out, they're not going to stand out at the same level as a big brand but people do want those things, maybe they want to bring in unique limited edition products, maybe they want a partner with local or their edited choice of food, coffee, scent, whatever it is, I think that that is a real opportunity and you're seeing more and more of it and those brands, those little independent things, some of them grow really fast because of it. But in a way they are the pinnacle of that kind of boutique shopping experience that people who actually want physical retail are after and if you're comparing it to giant luxury brand X in the UK certainly, those stores are not really that as a self-product either, like they're there to embody brand because if you don't have them you can't sell all of the products online and in Asia and whatever. So it's the same kind of like thing that you're doing at a totally different scale. Yeah, I guess it's. Yeah, I guess that's an interesting point in terms of consumers that are heading to those independent retailers or boutiques aren't expecting the same type of experience from the Marley that is a smaller, more personalized experience, it could be inviting another independent retailer that you know kind of fits with their offering into the same space, having a different experience. That is also as valuable for what they're looking for in terms of like they're not expecting a big installation with loads of things like that and it probably wouldn't serve them if that was the case. So that's yeah, it's interesting and I guess again comes back to kind of playing to the Y and whatever the retailer or brands of strengths are. Thanks to your audience for sure. Like you don't, you're totally right, you don't want the same experience otherwise you could go to the big brand. Yeah, I guess one thing I would like to ask with these in terms of say what makes successful experience, what makes a successful pop up for example is working in ways to kind of measure that or having an intention of mind like I guess it doesn't have to necessarily be we move this certain amount of products or we get these so many views but what are some of the ways to measure the impact and I guess maybe talk a bit towards obviously the discussion that comes with the client that you're working with and what they're looking for and I guess going from then in the best way of kind of measuring things. Yeah, it's something that we're putting more attention to as an agency. We're on a mission to become the world's most creative, sustainable and impactful brand experience agency. I like to think of both commercial and cultural impact where those cultural impact moments we're talking about headlines. Really, award wins, TBC whether it's really culture but it's certainly our internal design culture and ROI and not necessarily being able to attribute all the metrics to direct sales in the moment but the fact that the brand experience has reached which builds loyalty and awareness and in the long term does filter into that commercial so the commercials, the immediate commercial and then the longer term commercial impact by building a fan base of devoted followers by giving them nourishing, exciting experiences. Good examples of that we launched, well we sort of relaunched an app appearing in the UK market about five, maybe more years ago, maybe six, seven years ago. They didn't really have a specific audience here and the brand suffered a little bit from having lots of different demographics in lots of different places so it's worn by like, you know, older generation in Italy, young street kids in France, whatever. So they were like, right, we want to build an audience but we want to build a specific London audience and so we We did a whole project for them where we took a corner shop, an old corner shop.
like I mean like a convenience store in Shoreditch opposite what used to be the AsoTel and we turned it into a pop-up for them but it was completely non-commercial we weren't selling anything and it was there for five weeks and what they did is they partnered with local zines to create a week each zine five weeks five zines each zine created or a week of events and parties and activities and they took over the space alongside the big brand campaign that Napa Peri were doing at the time which was called out of nowhere which was all about belonging to the world as a citizen rather than belonging to you know your country it was a very it was in that moment where there was a lot of that chat going on post-Brexit etc and it was really really cool and then what they did was they had products that they'd bring influences in they'd get them dressed downstairs in the basement then they come and hang out they had social events they'd talks they had you know education all sorts of stuff and then you know five weeks later we turned into a shop which we designed and they could launch with a with a community and an audience and a loyalty and an authentic story and message as a good example of like how you might do something that feels competing on non-commercial in that one don't know the stats of the top of my head but we can find out we changed brand perception quite significantly in terms of percentage and we measured that through like an agency to measure that specific impact metric and it was nothing really to do with how much that brand was selling. Yeah I guess comes the point of you say the cultural impact I guess that's maybe sometimes more important of having that instant feedback than is the sales because the sales could come further down the line as that cultural impact kind of snowballs and becomes bigger and bigger. Yeah it's interesting and I guess seeing how different ways of measuring that over the like coming years will be interesting to say like brand awareness or for inception or these other things where that goes I think will be quite interesting development and how that will maybe change designs I don't know if do you ever work towards that in mind in terms of like the perception here is the most important thing does that affect like what your ideas in any way or what is it. I affect what you do I suppose but there's still this our process of taste and what looks good and feels good and all that sort of stuff is that we're not using any kind of impact measuring tool to do that that is a thing that exists in advertising they measure emotion and they measure you know we are essentially in some form of advertising it's like 3d brand advertising but we're not using those to inform our design process but we might use it to inform the strategy and direction of a project in order to think what we work here. Yeah I'm a believer that impact comes from emotion and from changing the way that people feel in a space and only when you change the way that people feel you get them excited you create a sense of awe or wonder or intrigue that's when you start to change their behaviour that's when they start taking a photo sharing things so emotion comes before impact and we definitely design for emotion and the output hopefully is impact but we can design in to track impact so we can say oh we want to know how many people want to engage with experience X and we can build in like counters and things to track that in a much more tactical way to sort of prove the ROI of oh a thousand people interacted with this thing therefore that's a thousand more people who've spent active time with your brand the theory being that they were they are more likely to then spend money with your brand in the long run because that dwell time and brand engagement does ultimately equal loyalty and spending with the brand. Yeah brilliant and just one final question before we move on to the ending segment but I just wanted to ask with touch on a little bit in terms of you know what a small retailers can do or not having to necessarily copy some of the bigger brands and creating these experiences but if there was maybe one attitude or aspect of having a great physical space that maybe bigger brands do better than the smaller names what is that and what can they do to try and replicate this? make people dream. When you were talking earlier about independent retailers a shop came to mind that I've never actually been into that is down the street from where we live and almost every month it's a wool shop and they knit an insane window every month and it does bring me such joy to walk past and see the creativity that they've brought into their window and I think that moments of joy and making people dream is how you get people to have that emotional connection with your brand and that can be done on a micro scale. Yeah that sounds amazing like the creativity is going to that again I guess it doesn't you know it necessarily cost a lot for them to do that but the impact it has says it's amazing. I mean look Gemma's remembered that store the best people in the business including those ones that we're thinking about are giving those that creative to the public their audience as a gift you know coach we built a giant hyper realistic T-rex in their window in Regent Street which has been in there for a year double-ordering the last week but you know it's a gift people are talking about it people are thinking about it like it is fun and exciting and courageous and that's what people do the luxury brands those windows and brand experiences that do are a gift to their audience to build trust and loyalty over many years you know a creative director of a brand that we use to work with once set a very big global Denon brand once said you know I'm not making these annoying changes because I want to sell your jeans tomorrow I'm making it so that you can sell jeans in 20 years and that is what good branding and good brand experiences about it's not short term and the mistake the people make is they think it's short term independent readers and big brands you've got to do the stuff you've got to do the VM as we would say you've got to jiggle things around get product in the windows and all that sort of stuff it hasn't gone away it's then important that we show stuff but mannequins in windows and and is not going to build your brand so you know think about how you want people to feel give them gifts in any business give value out and you will get value back in that's how this kind of art take on it and it works yeah amazing it's a great message to almost end on I think and yeah that just leaves us with our final segment which is a question from our previous weeks guest this occasion it was Todd Cassidy who is the co-founder of bridal retailer Wed to Be and he asks if you were to start your business over today what would you do differently and why more holidays it's very personal I think for me is it yours just take more days I think for me it would be take more risks early on we're really lucky at studio's ag we built the business you know I never borrowed we didn't we didn't ever borrow any money or anything like that and we are so lucky with the clients that we got a lot of that came from like good relationships and good conversations I think I would take more risks early on and I would I would start thinking about my kind of sale I don't even want to say sales but my my outward looking out activity more because we were just dealing with it as it came and we're so lucky our portfolio is amazing we do we do brilliant work but I think about that energy that we had in our 20s when we started I think God if we'd like to take the bull by the horns and and and gone for it we maybe would have gone slightly faster would that have been good or bad I don't know you know but I think we would take more risk early on we invest early on yeah great I think Todd will be really happy with that answer and yeah that is leaves us with one final thing is do you have a question for our next guest yeah I think we would like to ask what was the last time you went to a brand experience and you immediately or when you got home thought I need to call so and so someone that you love someone that you think would be and tell them to go and see this thing before they miss it yeah brilliant yeah we'll ask that to our next guest and you'll be interested to see what they say so yeah tune in thank you guys thank you so much for time and it's being to us dates and really interesting thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you
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