Discipline : Interior Design
: Grand Winner
Categories :
Commercial Space / Commercial Space 1,600 - 5,400 sq.ft. (150 - 500 sq.m.)
: Gold certification
Categories :
Special Awards / Interior Design + Materials
: Gold certification
Cozey Flagship Experience Centre
From Digital Presence to Physical Resonance
Cozey is a digital native, Montreal-based furniture start-up created during the pandemic. In 2023, the disruptive retailer wanted to create their first physical store, one that could faithfully translate their ethos, embody their “unique selling proposal”, be strongly differentiated from legacy competitors, and help customers interact directly with their products. The selected location was a 3275 sq. ft. streetside space in Queen West Village, Toronto, Canada.
Brandscaping Cozey
To operate this leap forward and envision the new flagship, the design team started by crafting and mapping the optimal in-store user journey, to capture key insights before any design and planning were conducted. A more formal design exploration process was then deployed to refine the store narrative, sequence the spaces and fix design fundamentals.
The workflow also integrated concurrent input from brand identity, website design and graphic design to seamlessly weave Cozey’s digital and physical realms in the space. The creative team’s mandate also included the built-in furniture design, from display platforms to shelving and design centre components, as well as the visual merchandising strategy for the furniture collections.
Physical Retail gets 'Cozey'
The result is a next generation store wholly merging Cozey’s digital and physical platforms. The space adopts a radical retail stance: it has no onsite storage, no cash registers and features instore display products acting as “physical avatars”, since purchasing is exclusively online via a mobile application.
As for the layout, the design approach is both UX and product focused, initiating the customer journey streetside with a stunning window showcase, evoking oversized fabric, to draw patrons inside. The elongated retail space then cleverly moves clients towards the design centre at the back, funneling them through successive “rings” inspired by a photographer’s studio cyclorama. Beyond enhancing the featured products, the curved and edge-light vinyl backdrops seamlessly run from floor to ceiling, creating an immersive shape that subliminally evokes generic house room proportions. In between rings, the designers hacked Cozey’s own shelving units to create a unifying backdrop featuring monochromatic domestic props.
The result is deceptively simple yet subverts conventional retail paradigms by straddling the digital and the physical worlds, while ensuring the primacy of product over brand, a core Cozey tenet.
The Essence of Comfort at Home
The Cozey Flagship is a direct response to the client’s design challenge: What is cozy? And how to embody it? Building on the start-up’s values of innovation and simplicity, the result is a wholly integrated brand and product experience - a cross of streetside store, experience centre and product showroom - creating both a highly functional and intimate space that captures the feeling of ultimate comfort at home.
