Retail stores are designed to attract and inspire consumers. They also function as communication platforms between brand and consumer. Customers, both consciously and unconsciously, decode messages embedded in the store design, and use them in their decision-making. But how can design managers know with any certainty whether the choices they make actually add value, to the products in the store? This dilemma has been addressed from varying perspectives in business-related design and marketing literature. John Heskett (2005) acknowledges the conflict of imperatives that obtains between a company and the users of its products and ascribes to design the role of providing a bridge between them. Philip Kotler (1973) underscores the need for designers to understand the targeted consumers by making a distinction between intended and perceived atmosphere. The intended atmosphere is, of course, the set of sensory qualities that the designer of an environment means to invoke. But a design is not always perceived as intended; indeed, perception can vary significantly from one customer to the next. Apart from offering insights in the retail designer’s process of creating stores that function as a marketing tool, this dissertation proposes a method for measuring whether decisions made by the store designer do indeed support the products from the targeted consumer’s perspective. In four articles, a toolbox is provided, offering insights of four types: (1) the theoretical and empirical, aimed at developing an understanding of the different categories within the retail designer's working process; (2) a codification of the stakeholders and constraint generators affecting the retail design process; (3) the proposal of a new method for studying spillover effects from store interior to product; and (4) the testing of this method in two field experiments, where we measure the effects of retail design on those for whom the design is ultimately intended: consumers.

Retail design concepts are complex designs meeting functional and aesthetic demands from various constraint generators. However, the literature on this topic is sparse and offers only little support for store designers dealing with such challenges. To address this issue, this paper aims to identify the most important constraint generators, investigating the types of constraints they generate and providing guidelines for how to deal with constraint elicitation.
The three contributions mentioned above are developed through discussions of the literature and eight case studies of fashion store design projects.
The paper shows that the influence of the constraint generators decreases during the design process except for supplier-generated constraints, which increase in the final stages of the design process. The paper argues that constraints should be elicited close to their occurrence, and that doing so requires a solid understanding of relevant constraint generators.
The paper provides a structured basis for further research and identifies areas warranting further study. Although the paper’s focus is on fashion store design, the findings may to some degree be applicable to other types of store design projects.
The understandings provided by this paper may help designers to deal proactively with constraints, reducing the use of resources to alter design proposals.
The paper: (1) defines the most important constraint generators from the perspective of retail store designers, (2) clarifies the types of constraints they generate, and (3) provides guidelines for how to deal with constraint elicitation.

Several frameworks of retail store environment variables exist, but as shown by this paper, they are not particularly well suited for supporting fashion store design processes.
Thus, in order to provide an improved understanding of fashion store design, the aim of this paper is to identify the most important store design variables, organise these variables into categories, understand the design constraints between categories, and determine the most influential stakeholders.
Based on a discussion of existing literature, the paper defines a framework of store design variables and constraints between these. The framework is investigated through six case studies of fashion store design projects.
Through a discussion of literature and empirical studies, the paper (1) identifies the most important store design variables, (2) organises these variables into categories, (3) provides an understanding of constraints between categories of variables, and (4) identifies the most influential stakeholders. The paper demonstrates that the fashion store design task can be understood through a system perspective, implying that the store design task becomes a matter of defining a set of subsystems, while considering their mutual interdependencies.
The proposed framework may be used as a point of departure and a frame of reference for future research into fashion store design.
The paper may support retail designers and retail managers in fashion store design processes by clarifying which store design variables to consider and providing an understanding of the constraints between them.
The perspective on the fashion store design task offered by the proposed framework adds a layer of understanding to the way in which existing literature describes the challenges related to store design. The empirical studies of fashion store projects demonstrate that the described system perspective offers a useful way of organising fashion store designers’ experiences from design processes.

Retail designers often emphasize the importance of creating stores that consumers will find attractive. This paper challenges that commonly held view, presenting empirical results from a field experiment showing that a positive rating of a store interior does not affect the product rating to the degree expected. This paper proposes a method for measuring spillover effects, which ordinarily take place without conscious attention. The method was applied in an experiment where 50 shoppers were asked to rate six fashion products in three differently designed stores. Respondents were asked to rate stores and products from within the stores. Any discrepancy between the in-store ratings can be interpreted as the influence of the store design. Results indicate measurable spillover effects from store design to product preference. Surprisingly, however, only one of the three stores showed a significant correlation between the respondents’ highest product rating and store preference.

Butikkens atmosfære påvirker forbrugerne, og jo større sammenhæng der er mellem produkt og indretning, des mere positivt opleves produktet. Førhen var sammenhængskraften i butikker helt naturlig, da produktion og salg foregik under samme tag. I takt med en øget efterspørgsel på autenticitet og gennemsigtighed er jagten gået ind på autentiske shopping-oplevelser.

Today Hans Wegner is particularly known for his beautifully designed wooden chairs, and his passion for wood as a building material most often meant these chairs projected the wood’s natural radiance. However, there are also painted chairs among his works. It is here we find the lesser-known canteen chairs, designed in 1982-83 for Politikens Hus on Copenhagen’s Town Hall Square. (Politikens Hus houses the national daily newspaper, Politiken.) It was part of an interior design assignment Wegner carried out together with his daughter, Marianne Wegner Sørensen, and Politiken’s building chief and house architect at the time, Anne Krebs. That Politikens Hus chose Wegner as designer of the project can well be due to a successful collaboration with Wegner’s Drafting Studio in 1978-79 in laying out the newspaper’s management offices. Here it had been decided to furnish the rooms with a specially fabricated, black-stained version of the Round Chair, so the idea of using painted Wegner chairs in Politikens Hus was not unheard of when work began on designing the new canteen chairs, which came to be known as ‘The Politiken Chairs’.