Further raising its profile in Shanghai, FREITAG will inaugurated another retail space in the Xian Suo area of town on Sat – Mar 25, and it’s one that has been carefully prepping for two years. During that time, the Zurich-based bag manufacturer collaborated with local architects, landscape gardeners, engineers, designers and an on-site team to develop an innovative building concept that would generate minimal CO₂ emissions and resulted in a visually distinctive store with social relevance for the surrounding neighbourhood. FREITAG has been known to reuse discarded materials not only for its bags, but also in its store design, and its new store in this sprawling metropolis even takes it up a notch. Rubble from building sites has been turned into walls, and hoarding panels have been transformed into a characteristic façade.
Also, many elements retrieved from the existing building have retained or reused wherever possible, and if new materials were the only option, they were sourced within a radius of around 100 kilometers. Situated in a neighbourhood that’s not particularly known for on-trend shopping, the FREITAG store occupies two levels of a redeveloped 1980s industrial building, and features an interior design by kooo architects, a practice based in both Tokyo and Shanghai. The store has a distinct industrial aesthetic and makes the most of the building’s concrete shell and featuring exposed bricks across the premises, and sees signature retail elements, such as FREITAG‘s storage system. The ground floor is home to both a sizeable repair shop and a workshop space.
Mind you, the latter has been especially developed for this store, and shoppers can get a first-hand experience of the digital F-Cut customisation tool. Normally, the process involves screens, but here, shoppers can use an industrial remote control to place a pattern for a full-size bag model on a tarp projection and design their own bag from used truck tarps. On the two upper floors, the full range of FREITAG bags, pouches and accessories can be found. Here, seating objects have been created in collaboration with designer Leandro Destefani which tell the story behind the materials in an abstract but tangible way, and were inspired by the piles of truck tarps on the shelves at the FREITAG factory in Zurich. Last but not least, the rooftop features an organic community garden with local plants which promotes biodiversity.
FREITAG
Building 12, No. 30 Lane 319, Jiaozhou Lu (Xian Suo)
200040 Shanghai
Daily 12pm-8.30pm
Publishers Note
Just to be clear – superfuture® is a design blog and not a political commentator. No surprise there. The scope of our content has always been global and borderless, however that can often mean covering projects in countries where we will not agree with the politics or actions of those countries. In a world that’s as screwed up as ever right now, the focus of our support is to those designers, architects and other creatives who aim to make the world a more liveable one – as opposed to people that try their hardest to destroy it. So if a project hits our desk and we like it based on its design credentials, we may choose to publish regardless of its location or creators nationality. superfuture® has always been inclusive and hopes for all current wars, aggression, violence, hate and extremism to end.
