Carrefour, the famous French supermarket chain, operates multiple store markets: hyper, market & express. In the mid-2010’s the Belgian branch contracted various partners to manage its communication and retail design missions. Carré Associates was at the time working on the weekly flyers for Carrefour Market.

As the client was pleased with our company’s work, it contracted it to work on the re-design of its Carrefour Express shops. What appealed to them was the research based approach offered by Carré Associates, where all store concepts were inspired from a brief set through an initial Shopper research phase, identifying key shopping missions around which the store experience should be crafted.

Via focus groups, in-store interviews and observations, our research team conducted a thorough analysis of the Shopper experience with the current Carrefour Market concept. Their conclusions, as follows, served as our creative brief for the concept design:

• The Carrefour brand was well known and appreciated
• The specifications of the sub-brands, and in this instance, Carrefour Express, were less clear
• To differentiate this specific format from the rest, the research results showed the design should highlight:
  • • pleasure: highlighting the “fresh” & destination products, offering a modern and warm interior, dedicated staff, premium quality & cleanliness
    • local: “green” & locally sourced products, seasonality, traceability, product information
    • efficiency: overview, speed, implementation, legibility, cash desks, opening times
    • price: fair prices, promos, loyalty

We were asked to prepare a concept book in view of a nationwide roll-out, using a store located in Waterloo as the pilot. Our scope would however stop at this initial concept proposal as due to budget constraints, Carrefour would then utilise its own teams to prepare the more detailed documentation and oversee implementation.

My role within the Carré Assosciates team was to liaise with our research head, collaborate with my other retail design colleague as well as the graphic design team to translate the brief into the most coherent and clear concept proposal possible. In the limited time and budget we worked on setting out key principles for:

• the shopfront – including suggesting an ideal as well as “minimal” version to account for potential urban restrictions
• floor implementations
• the main interior zones
• key furniture elements

To further support the presentation document, I also prepared a Sketchup model and video extracted from it.