Retail Architecture As Brand Strategy with Alexander Josephson

IN CLEAR FOCUS: World-renowned architect Alexander Josephson, co-founder of PARTISANS, discusses his approach to retail architecture as brand strategy. The physical space a customer enters is the most concentrated expression of a brand. Discover why separating architecture and marketing budgets damages credibility. From Bar Raval to Union Station, learn how treating store environments as brand infrastructure shapes customer behavior, builds authentic connections, and drives commercial success.

Episode Transcript

Adrian Tennant: Coming up in this episode of IN CLEAR FOCUS

Alexander Josephson: Your question is, how do I interpret their brief? But I interrogate first. Like anything in this world, quality is rare, and there's a reason it's rare. It's a mentality. And beauty emerges when design misbehaves, not when it tries to copy everything else.

Adrian Tennant: You are listening to IN CLEAR FOCUS, fresh perspectives on marketing and advertising produced weekly by Bigeye, a strategy-led, full-service creative agency growing brands for clients globally. Hello, I'm your host, Adrian Tennant, Bigeye’s Chief Strategy Officer. Thank you for joining us. Marketers spend enormous energy forging emotional connections through messaging and media. Yet the most literal expression of a brand, the physical space a customer walks into, is often treated as a separate line item, owned by real estate or operations rather than marketing. The brands we think of as design icons see it differently. For them, the building and the marketing are one and the same thing. So what happens when you treat physical space not as overhead, but as brand infrastructure, engineered to shape how people feel, behave, and remember? My guest today has built a career on exactly that idea. Alexander Josephson is co-founder of PARTISANS, the Toronto-based architecture studio behind some of North America's most talked-about retail, hospitality and civic spaces, from the Bar Raval cocktail bar to the Royal de Versailles Rolex boutique on Bloor Street. The only Canadian to receive the Van Alen Institute's New York Prize Fellowship, Alexander has guided PARTISANS to more than 30 international design awards. To discuss retail architecture as a brand asset, I'm delighted that Alexander is joining us today from Toronto, Canada. Alexander, welcome to IN CLEAR FOCUS.

Alexander Josephson: Thanks for having me, Adrian.

Adrian Tennant: Well, brand teams spend enormous energy engineering emotional connection through advertising and media. The physical space a customer steps into is arguably the most concentrated expression of that connection. And yet it rarely falls within the marketing function. Alexander, how much of a brand actually lives in its physical space?

Alexander Josephson: Well, Adrian, you're more of an expert at advertising and marketing than I am. It's everywhere. That design is everywhere. It's not just about your customers. You have to be completely consistent about how your brand conveys itself even to your staff and the people who deliver for you. If it's inconsistent, they can't actually tell your story.

Adrian Tennant: True.

Alexander Josephson: So forget about your clients. If your staff aren't experiencing it, how are they selling what you're doing? They have to lie. They have to make it up. So I think that architecture and design are, at least from a retail perspective, just so central to your viability. If you're brick and mortar, how that works physically is just- it is pivotal. Can't be expressed more in terms of its importance.

Adrian Tennant: Got it. Well, in most companies, the money spent on architecture sits in one budget and the money spent on marketing sits in another. So what does a brand lose when it keeps those two budgets and those two ways of thinking completely separate?

Alexander Josephson: A brand loses viability and credibility. The best brands in the world do this properly. They know the architecture and the marketing are the same bucket, if not extensions of each other. You can go to the easiest example, low-hanging fruit right now, what's happening in New York between even just the scaffolding that LVMH is doing in front of their stores on Fifth Avenue. The scaffolding is a multi-million dollar branding exercise that the employees of the construction companies work within. And they're delivering what's behind, which will be this extraordinary customer experience and staff experience of their brand and a manifestation of their values. But it's gotten to the point where the big brands especially in fashion, they get it. In fact, they get it so well that I think it probably intimidates the other brands in the world. They just give up and they don't do it. That's my guess. It's just perceived as being so expensive to do it right, but it's not. You don't have to go to the extreme to develop an expression of any brand in its physical way through its stores and footprints. You don't have to just go to the extreme fashion end. Look at Home Depot. Home Depot is a perfect manifestation of its brand, right? It's this extraordinary immersion into the warehouse of materials. And you almost feel like it's wholesale but it's not, it's retail.

Adrian Tennant: I did not think that I would be talking to Alexander Josephson about Home Depot today, but you know what? That just goes to show.

Alexander Josephson: Well, most architecture students live in a Home Depot because if you're making models and you need materials, or if you've just started your architecture firm, you're inevitably probably bootstrapping things. And that means you're spending a lot of time in Home Depot. Good. They're very good at manifesting their brand.

Adrian Tennant: Well, it's interesting that you've identified the brands that get it right, tending to be luxury fashion houses. So people like Armani, Hermes, Rolex, and I guess also vertical brand worlds like you find in Ginza, Tokyo. What is it that those brands understand about physical space that most mass market brands, except the Home Depot, still miss?

Alexander Josephson: I actually think that there's examples of great actors at every economic, I would say-scale, within each sector. I don't believe that it's limited to just the fashion sector. I mentioned Home Depot because it's a very specific entity in a different sector and it does a very good job of its physical store branding and experience. And there's examples of many brands that get it. Let's go to restaurants because you mentioned restaurants. Restaurants have to remain differentiated as the entire world evolves and cuisine tastes around it. They have to remain vital and have a longevity, and a relevance, and a timelessness, for them to be successful. And probably the hardest sector to have success in is restaurant, right? Food service, I guess it was 80%. 80% failure rate in five years, something like that. It's a huge number. And what you see in terms of restaurants, like Starbucks is a great example, right? Like this Ascendant brand in the early aughts, these outlets that had a kind of look and feel, you could sit and work there. And then the whole world descended on cafes, and you had designer cafes and their attention to detail and design, really usurped in certain contexts Starbucks. And now Starbucks is redoubling down on their spaces and places and doing things differently. And they're even co-locating in places like other businesses. And so I think that the sophistication in terms of how brands are dealing with space transcends fashion. I think it goes to all different spaces. But restaurants in particular, you have to build something that everybody wants to go back to over and over again. And the space, some food critics say you can't eat atmosphere. Well, atmosphere is the first thing you're consuming before you take a bite, drink a glass of wine, before you take a seat. And in fact, the seat is what you feel before any of those things occur. And what you see, feel, and hear in a restaurant space will condition whether you're coming back, full stop. Lots of people go back to restaurants that are, frankly, mediocre because they're such wonderful spaces to be in. And I would be remiss by saying this restaurant's mediocre, but it's beautiful. But you know and I know that there are certain places you probably frequent now and then, just because you really like going back there. So there's that, but then there are the ones where they get it all right. And we've happened to be really lucky. Three of the restaurants that we've done, not only did they go on compromising to the story of their brand. So for example, Bar Raval is an Art Nouveau inspired immersion in Spanish culture. And how do you do that? And how do you do it in a way that is good enough to bring people from around the world to want to not only see it, but eat it? And they've won a Michelin Bib Gourmand because they're not a sit-down restaurant, they're a tapas bar. So did Quetzal by the same owner. Different concept, Michelin stars. I believe it's two Michelin stars and 50 best restaurants, eighth best in North America.

Adrian Tennant: Wow.

Alexander Josephson: Mexican concept and the story behind Quetzal, is fire-only cuisine. So you're cooking everything on a line of fire under a tent like market structure. Now, how do you do these things without being kitsch? In Bar-Raval, it's a million dollars in C&C mahogany and steel and beautiful lighting and custom metalwork, wherein research had to take place to actually bring those surfaces to life. Quetzal, the billowing of a Mexican market canvas shade, translated into plaster and the lighting. In the context of restaurants, we have a lot of experience. If you bring a great chef, a great owner, operator, because devil's in the details in restaurants, and a great design story. You have a 50-year restaurant, and those are the restaurants that create generational wealth, but also those are the institutions that define the cities they're in, because you go to cities to eat. You don't just go to cities, do business, visit friends, whatever. You go because you want to experience their culture through food. And so restaurants are a great example, and we've been able to do a few of those. But you go around the world, and you can see each city, they have their quintessential restaurants. In some cases, they're antithetical, like Jiro in the subway in Tokyo. 10 seats, minimal, in a subway. It is that anticlimactic sort of dissonance between the quality and the space that makes it so extraordinary, right? But it's an equally interesting story because you go down into the subterranean ground into a hole in the wall, and it's the greatest sushi master in the history of Omikase sushi tradition. And it's all about telling stories. That's the same thing that's true about Home Depot, and it is the same thing that is true about LVMH in Paris or Fifth Avenue. It's just a question of, “Are you actually connecting those dots?” The story, the operators, the product, and the architecture. The reality is a lot of people spin that there's a story. A lot of people make it up. People understand authenticity. And they know when something's true, at least from an experience perspective. So if you're trying to convince someone of something that's not true, they're going to know.

Adrian Tennant: Oh, yeah. Well, Bar Raval is a pretty small room, but you engineered it so that people lean in, stand quite close together, and almost become part of the woodwork in the best possible sense. How deliberate is that choreography of how a visitor moves and feels inside the space?

Alexander Josephson: Extremely deliberate. So much so that they didn't want to put any stools, and initially there were no forks. There were no forks. You had to use toothpicks.

Adrian Tennant: Okay.

Alexander Josephson: The greatest proprietors, whether it's a retail store, restaurant, fashion brand, and now medical offices, you're starting to see how these medical offices and even veterinarian experiences, they're really elevating the experience. Everything has to tell a story. And so in Madrid and Barcelona, tapas bars are not sit-down experiences, really. They're leaning up against a ledge, a bar. It's active ,It's in and out, It's talk to your neighbor, It's go there alone. That was the entire intent about how the design of Baroval played out. But if you look at, say, our project for Rolex and Royal de Versailles in Toronto, it's a very ironic project because some Rolex stores are owned by Rolex, some are franchises. It just happens to be that in Toronto, they're both franchises and this family owns the rights to them. And the family actually went through four or five architecture firms before saying, this just isn't good enough. We don't have a story here. It doesn't live up to the level of design excellence and reverence and history that the brands that we sell, and that we create experiences around doesn't live up to those stories. And so they're like, “Oh, we've got a cocktail of PARTISANS.” And they say it grudgingly because they know it's going to cost them a lot of money because to do something extraordinary on a high street, do a new facade, do a new store, that's not trivial. So if you're not willing to make the investment, you can't get there. It's not that everything has to be expensive. But, if you're not willing to invest in the experience and there isn't a crossover of the marketing dollars and the fit-out dollars, at least for what you call the hero locations, then you can't make it work. Back to Rolex, though, it was funny. The owner of the franchise here hired us. And we did this extraordinary project for them. And it got a huge amount of attention. And then Rolex got upset because they were like, “We didn't authorize this. We didn't.” And it was just like, well, fine, we won't call it Rolex. And then apparently the the president of Rolex was like, “This is amazing. Did we do this?” So like the people here at the local level of Rolex were upset that like, they weren't calling the shots on it was a very funny story. But basically, in the end, I think the the mothership loved it. And in the end, when they did the branded scaffold, they actually put our work through like a sketch engine and it was kind of interesting to watch, but the way brands control their image, their architecture is different, but that's an example of where it's tightly controlled.

Adrian Tennant: Let's take a short break. We'll be right back after this message.

Adrian Tennant: Welcome back. Welcome back. I'm talking with Alexander Josephson, co-founder of PARTISANS, about treating physical space as brand infrastructure, and what that means for marketers reimagining retail. Alexander, when a client comes to PARTISANS, do they usually arrive knowing what kind of behavior they want to create, or do you have to draw that out of them?

Alexander Josephson: People come to us to innovate for them. So they know what they need to do. They have very clear brief of what they want to achieve, but they know they need to do it either completely differently than they have done before, and they don't know what that is yet. Or, they want to be taken on a journey to discover new ground. So they come to us to invent for them. We're able to translate their needs, their requirements, into a new outcome that differentiates their product, their brand, their story from everybody else. That's what we've become known for. And every single one of our projects has been a complete success when it comes to commercial and retail environments. Even a train station in Toronto, we flipped that on its head being a conduit versus a destination. We helped reposition the retail quality at Union Station in Toronto, which is about 700,000 people a day. It's a very important transit hub in the global spectrum, right? Like a million people a day. And that's become a total retail success, a phenomenal success. And it speaks to the importance of the client recognizing that they need to innovate on the design side. They can't just produce and a lot of companies go to corporate. Retail is funny. A lot of the big stories where you have rollouts across countries in the world, you have to go to these big giant companies to deliver for you right? But the problem is those companies don't design. They delivery and the design they do necessarily, usually- is not very inventive. And so the problem is for those companies that need to deliver 100 stores, or 1,000 stores, or 10 stores, they automatically go to, “Oh, I need a big box delivery partner.” Companies like, for instance, Aesop, they don't do that. They may have a delivery partner for a country, but they will get a designer for each local market. And that is sophisticated retail. In the context of Rolex, they did that with us. They hired a local, which was us, and we delivered an extraordinary outcome for them. got a huge amount of earned media from that. Magazines, all the world print and digital, enormous success. So you have to be very sensitive to how your five wall team, like the delivery team, you have to be careful about how procurement impacts your customer experience and your retail experience, because a lot of the time they end up defaulting to that. And that's where brands fail.

Adrian Tennant: When we were preparing for this interview, you told me a bit about how you read a brief because architecture is a rigorous, quantifiable zero-sum game. A building either makes its money back or it doesn't. So when a client hands you a brief, how do you interrogate what they're really asking for before you design anything?

Alexander Josephson: I interrogate how serious they are. I question I ask why. I say, are you sure? Are you sure you want to do something special? What's your definition of special? I put it to them. And then, obviously, the final arbiter is, are they willing to pay you properly? If they're not willing to pay you properly, that probably is a good indication that they're actually not willing to build anything interesting either, most of the time. There's maybe some exceptions to that, but you have to analyze a potential client's behavior. And that's not really your question. Your question is, “How do I interpret their brief?” But I interrogate first. Because like anything in this world, quality is rare. And there's a reason it's rare. It's a mentality. And beauty emerges when design misbehaves, not when it tries to copy everything else. And if they're not willing to engage in a process of discovery and authentic conversation, and they want you to just do what they want you to do, well, then they just need a tool to deliver what they already know, and they don't need you. So that's not a good fit for us. But what we're really good at, I think, is taking a brief, taking a context. In the end, where a retail or hospitality project, anything commercial, where those places exist, the context, it needs to be part of the discussion. And so you have to examine, where are they asking you to do something? What are they asking you to do? Do they have any idea of what it's going to cost to do it? How ambitious is their language? Is their language dissonant from what their actual other projects are? Do you ask them why? I think you have to have a really honest conversation before you start a project, and that's where it begins. And tons of brands have come to us. And we just make it clear like, oh, you already have your design. You don't need us. You just need a delivery partner. Off you go. Right? But you have to be sensitive to what they need and what they want. You know, they can say they want design, but they really need a delivery partner. Then that's when you know they don't even understand design because they can't differentiate between a designer and a delivery partner.

Adrian Tennant: I'd love to go back and talk to you a little bit more about Union Station in Toronto, which of course PARTISANS reimagined from a transit conduit really into a destination. Now, staying with the money for a moment, I understand the revenue per square foot has come in roughly three times what was projected. How directly do you connect that commercial result to the design decisions you made?

Alexander Josephson: Well, let's just do some history on this. Union Station was a lot of people working on it, a lot of companies. It was always a retail component to the project. The client who has the head lease over the station said, “We need to deliver something exceptional.” And what's on the books right now is corporate, and that's not exceptional, and it's not going to feel good. And we need to reinvent this. So it's one thing to say, “Oh, this is designed for retail already.” It's another thing to do it well and exceptionally well. And that means fighting the good fight so that every space is exceptional. In Toronto, there's something very unique in the world. It's called the PATH system. It gets very cold in Toronto, so there's an entire underground mall that exists in downtown Toronto. It's famous globally. It's kilometers of pathways and retail experiences for all of the office workers downtown, and it's amazing. But Union Station was essentially an extension of the path, which is a sort of low slung ceiling, fluorescent light, corporate environment that is very much like- transactional and useful and functional, but not a place to linger. And certainly not a destination, it's a convenience. And there's a difference between a convenience and a destination. And so kudos to all the teams that made Union Station physically in its shell possible and its idea. But did they understand how to make those retail places truly a destination and have human scaled and authentic designed possibilities emerge? That's to be debated. Our team had to fight tooth and nail for years to make sure that those spaces were dynamic. That there was a diversity of experiences, that the food court didn't feel like the heritage shops, didn't feel like the other retail areas, that there was a sense of community to each large-scale program within those spaces, and that there was design innovation. And that even in the context of heritage spaces, we pushed the boundaries even on the quality of, say, like the signs. And most importantly, creating a design constitution station, which was a platform for Canada's best culinary, cultural, and retail offerings. So not just any tenants, tenants that wanted to make the best pastry, tenants that made the best Canadian-produced apothecary products, the best burger joints in the world. So not junk, right? And he went from a place that smelled like Cinnabon. Really, if you went to Union Station 20 years ago, all you would be able to smell is Cinnabon because that was the kind of food service that was there. Now you go down there because there's actual merchants and restaurants that you would want to go to regardless of whether you're going to a hockey game or anything else. Spots there that if you work downtown, you want to go there to go see. It's not just a convenience. It's been a wild success financially because they invested in the experience of how the individual feels. They invested in the story, and they really paid for high quality. They really pushed the envelope in terms of the materials and making each space the best space it could possibly be. Kudos to them because it took a lot of willpower to move the dial there.

Adrian Tennant: Well, for a brand owner or a chief marketing officer who has physical spaces but has never thought of them as brand infrastructure, what's the first question you think they should ask the architects and designers they hire?

Alexander Josephson: You have to decide what you want. If you're just trying to put a coat of paint on things, then there's a certain horse for that course. If you want to deliver an in-house vision for your brand that has been mocked up, and prototyped, and designed in-house, that's another horse for a different course. If you have an idea of your brand and you need to reinvent, you need to re-establish that. That is something entirely different than those others. And there is not a good architect that does all three of those. There really aren't. And anybody who says any different is lying because slapping a coat of paint on is not something that I'm going to be good at, period, full stop. Delivering some other architect's work is not something I'm going to be good at, nor will I be cost effective at doing it. But if you want me to help you invent your physical experience, if you want me to help you attract an entirely new audience away from your competition, I am your man. I am your company. I am your partner. But I think for retail and any commercial company that's looking to deliver physical locations, you have to decide what you're doing. And you have to be very clear about it and pick the right team to partner with you. Because if you're not aligned on that, then it'll really not be a good success. So, a delivery partner that's- you know, really is a multinational or a pan-national company. Fundamentally, 99% of those can't design at the level you need to, to reinvent a brand. It's just not compatible with that business model.

Adrian Tennant: This has been a really great conversation. Alexander, if IN CLEAR FOCUS listeners would like to learn more about you and PARTISANS, what's the best way to do so?

Alexander Josephson: Oh, so many ways. Google PARTISANS. You can visit PARTISANS.com. You can look up my name, Alexander Josephson. I'm on Instagram, so it's AlexanderJosephson on Instagram, and it's partisanarchitecture on Instagram as well and LinkedIn. You can look up our work on Wallpaper, Dezeen, DesignBoom, all the design outlets.

Adrian Tennant: Perfect. Alexander, thank you very much for being our guest this week on IN CLEAR FOCUS.

Alexander Josephson: Thanks for having me, Adrian. I really enjoyed it.

Adrian Tennant: Thanks again to my guest this week, Alexander Josephson, co-founder of PARTISANS. As always, you'll find a complete transcript of our conversation with timestamps and links to the resources we discussed on the IN CLEAR FOCUS page at Bigeyeagency.com. Thank you for listening to IN CLEAR FOCUS, produced by Bigeye. I've been your host, Adrian Tennant. Until next week, goodbye.

Timestamps

00:00: Introduction to IN CLEAR FOCUS

00:20: The Importance of Physical Space in Branding

02:08: The Role of Architecture in Brand Experience

03:38: Consequences of Separate Budgets for Architecture and Marketing

05:10: Examples of Brands That Get It Right

06:57: Understanding Physical Space Across Different Sectors

08:27: The Role of Atmosphere in Restaurants

10:06: Creating Memorable Restaurant Experiences

11:37: Choreographing Visitor Experience in Design

12:51: The Story Behind the Rolex Boutique Project

15:02: Bigeye Book Club Promo

16:19: Client Expectations and Design Innovation

19:12: Interrogating Client Briefs for Design Projects

22:02: Reimagining Union Station as a Destination

25:49: Key Questions for Brand Owners Hiring Architects

28:01: Conclusion and How to Connect with Alexander Josephson

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