Spanish shoe retailer and brand Camper provides a new reason for visiting the Paris’s Beaubourg area with a store that takes a pretty unusual stance to visual merchandising and layout.

For those of a certain age possessing a passing interest in modern art, Paris means the Pompidou Centre, a museum where you can get your fix of Picasso, Matisse and sundry other modern greats, while admiring one of Brit architect Lord Rogers’ more impressive buildings.

Now Spanish shoe retailer and brand Camper provides another reason for visiting the city’s Beaubourg area with a store that takes a pretty unusual stance to visual merchandising and layout.

Created by Paris-based architect Balistreri, working with French designers Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec and with lighting by Ansorg, this is a store design that plays with bold colours: reds, oranges and greens, and which uses quilts to partly cover its walls. The latter, which also serve as sound insulators, are employed as perimeter display equipment with single shoes attached to them in colours that contrast with the quilts.

The mid-shop is where the bulk of the Camper ranges are displayed with a mix of high and low tables created by the Bouroullec brothers, covered with further quilts. Glance around and it would be quite easy to miss that you are actually in a Camper store with more or less the only reference to the brand, other that the stock itself, being the logo that has been attached to the on-message red cash and wrap desk.

The store design and merchandising is in keeping with the nearby museum with the same sense that what you are looking at is a collection of precious items, rather than just a shoe shop.
However, it is the kind of luxury that only high(er) priced brands can afford. This is not about volume presentation.