The Science Unseen

Photo Credit: Coutesy of Touchpoint Retail

When you walk into Best Buy, chances are the last thing on your mind is how it looks. To most consumers Best Buy is what it is. It’s a brightly lit warehouse to go for all things electronic at a good price. As a store, it’s utilitarian: As a consumer I want a TV, so I will go to the big store that sells TVs regardless of what the store looks like, assuming what it looks like is palatable. In a word, then, the design of Best Buy is an afterthought to the consumer.

How about an Apple Store? An Apple Store is a living, breathing, interactive example of the most pervasive and iconic brand since, well, the beginning of time. Although like Best Buy, there is a utilitarianism to an Apple Store—I need my Mac fixed, so I will go here to fix it—it manages to marry said high-functioning usability harmoniously with aesthetically pleasing artifice, which brings the brand to life. In a word, then, design at an Apple Store is beyond relevant. Design is an Apple Store—because design is Apple.

The difference? An Apple Store is a well-wrought, cohesive extension of the Apple brand; whereas the traditional Best Buy is simply about delivering the best product at the lowest price.

Now turn your attention to Best Buy store 7 in Roseville, Minn. From the outside, it’s your standard Best Buy. Blue trimmings, neon logo, bigger than most airports—but step through the doors and, unless you’re eyeballs deep in your smart phone, you’ll notice something different, something more minimal in its gargantuan-ness, something more stylish, something more intuitive, something smarter, something—no offense to Best Buy 3, 5, 77, 98, etc.—much, much better.

That’s where Touchpoint Retail comes in.

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When you walk into Best Buy 7 you’ll see a different sort of Best Buy. Although still within a massive warehouse, the store showcases a spare, modern aesthetic and is vastly more defined and sectored-off (into what Touchpoint calls feature sections) than what you’re used to, which creates a more intimate, informative feel within each department and an overall novel consumer experience. Further, the center of Best Buy 7 features a large arena, bordered by a square LCD display suspended from the ceiling, where one might go to find expert advice and troubleshooting, a la the Genius Bar at an Apple Store. And while it’s more or less an experimental store for Best Buy, in many ways it’s the culmination of years of vision and the well-calculated insider’s hunch that created Touchpoint Retail.

Based in Minneapolis, Touchpoint is the brainchild of two architects and a branding guy—Nat Shea and Ken Piper, principals and founders of Minneapolis-based architecture and design firm Tanek, and Josh Hanson, formerly with Best Buy among other retail giants—who saw a major hole in the retail marketplace.

“Repeatedly over our careers as architects we’ve run into instances where we’re working with a client, and we’re solving the architectural puzzle, and it’s a beautiful space; and then their marketing group shows up and they start putting stuff up, and then our store environment might not even look like what their campaign is, or what their vision is because they’re approaching it from two separate entities,” says Shea of the disconnect he perceived from his perch atop Tanek.

Piper adds, “I think somehow it was the excitement of being called in on a job, coming in to do it and finding out all the pieces weren’t aligning, but we were the only ones who knew that.”

As architects, Shea and Piper felt as though they were often coming in too late in the process, which marginalized and compartmentalized their efforts. They knew that for a retail space or restaurant to properly materialize, all the parts of the store—from concept to design to build-out to branding—needed to mesh on the same organic level.

“I think we’ve changed that model by saying the architecture component is one subset of what Touchpoint does and now it’s a matter of looking at that project as a whole and understanding and designing it from that perspective,” says Shea.

For the model to change, they needed to bring in someone from the other side of the table—marketing—which is where Josh Hanson, who’d done some cursory work with Tanek when he was with Best Buy, came in.

“I came from the Best Buy corporate world and other corporate positions, from the design side of things,” says Hanson, also a regular speaker on retail design at the University of St. Thomas, describing the similar void he saw from his side of the retail table. “There are all the legacy design firms that have been around for decades and have offices around the country and the world, but there wasn’t really that local partner that sits with you, problem-solves, delivers solutions and actually makes it happen … I had some ideas about what was needed out there, and [Shea and Piper] happened to be right in line with that. They were like, ‘We’ve had Tanek, but we see this entirely other facet of work out there.’”

As Shea says, “Josh understands that corporate culture and where the marketing sides are and the branding is, and we deal with the environment, and we knew we had to get those pieces together.”

Which is why Shea and Piper, who still run Tanek—with a client roster including Bremer Bank, Pizza Luce, and a variety of medical and dental clinics among others—were willing to stake their names to the new business.

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Touchpoint is what the principals call “a full-service creative group that provides scalable, optimized retail solutions utilizing the latest technology, superior design and craftsmanship while meeting the highest standards in social and environmental responsibility.”

“Our philosophy is that the environment has to work together to bring all those parts and pieces together,” says Shea of their efforts to create an experience-based design firm. “The clients we have as Touchpoint Retail want us to look at things in a more comprehensive way. We’re still doing design and architecture for them, but it’s not the head of it.”

When a client hires Touchpoint they get something previously unheard-of in a retail setting: a one-stop shop. Within one company, a client gets the expertise and skill of a top-notch architect folded into a package that also includes all the fundamentals of branding, marketing and advertising.

“The big differentiator is, you’ve got a lot of branding firms, you’ve got a lot of architecture firms, and you’ve got a lot of fixture companies, but we bring brand, nonphysical and physical together,” says Hanson. “We’re one of the few companies out there who actually designs and builds everything that physically brings that brand to life in the store. Going to any other firm in the Cities you’re getting either really strong branding or really strong architecture, but not a combination of both.”

Translated: If company X wants to try something new in their retail environment they can go to Touchpoint, write one check and be promised the entire process. Touchpoint will work with the client from brainstorming to copywriting to art/design, all the way through the architectural drafting, build-out and finishing of the space.

“The thing about Touchpoint that I really like is that they can tailor their offering to your specific needs,” says Ron Brunette, a former senior vice president of store environments at Sears Holdings, who has been working with Touchpoint on and off for the past six years. “They don’t have a package they offer, but they can build a package according to what it is you’re looking for.”

“I was able to start out projects with them and say, ‘This is the end result we’re looking for,’” continues Brunette, articulating how Touchpoint can provide all of the elements, but also only those a company needs. “They would ask where we would get the various pieces from and if I had it or had access to it already; they didn’t require that I hire them just for the sake of hiring them to do that.”

Anywhere from 12 weeks to one year later, when the client emerges from Touchpoint’s strategic bubble, they will not only have a built-out  space, they will have all the numbers and process to get to that point the next time on their own.

“I didn’t really feel uncomfortable working with Touchpoint to fill in the gaps from my group,” says Brunette. “That’s not all that common. Typically it’s a real us vs. them situation. Whereas with Touchpoint you get to the point where you can integrate their services with what you already provide. So not only is it about eliminating redundancy for cost savings, it also helps integrate the results so that at the point where you need to take it over, you’re much more able to.”

“There is a certain point when they value, engineer and internalize what we’ve done,” adds Hanson.

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Consequently, Touchpoint’s client roster is stable but ever-changing, with up to 12 active projects going on at one time. Touchpoint is currently working on a large project in Times Square, a retail project with the Minneapolis Public Library, and a revamped auto service concept for Sears. It has also done branding and packaging work for Surly Brewing Company, and worked with Comcast, New Horizon, Kids Quest, Wedding Day Diamonds, the Mall of America, and Mohegan Sun, Thunder Valley and Paragon casinos.

They also focus on a different angle of the retail industry: medical. They count Stat Wellness Shop, United Health Group, St. John’s Mercy Health System, Children’s Hospital, Memorial Health and Healthpoint as current or former clients.

“There was a void in medical retail,” says Shea, who specialized in the medical retail sector. “There was a lot of hospital work being done, but nothing towards enhancing the customer experience. It’s a way of taking this revenue that’s been walking out the door and bringing it into an environment that makes people feel more comfortable about what they’re going through.”

“The patient was being defined in the medical world in a really sterile, sanitized way,” adds Piper, whose forte is hospitality. “The patient is the customer. So what is the customer experience? How do you enhance the customer experience?”

And in that way, Piper is also summing up why what they’ve done in Best Buy Roseville is so profound: It has blended the ideal of the company with the ideal of what a retail concept can be in a seamless way that is simple to perpetuate.

“This is like a box you’ve created in tandem with them, so that when you have to pick up the box by yourself, you know exactly what’s in that box,” says Ron Brunette. “It’s much easier if you’re there right from the beginning so that when you’re at the implementation point, which is the roll-out of hundreds of stores, you understand the whole thing.”