Eye Candy, Belgium

Creating a successful retail experience is a clever balancing act of many factors; branding, interiors, product, marketing… miss one vital ingredient and the whole soufflé comes caving in. That’s what makes this interiors, branding and packaging exercise by Belgian designers Creneau International so brilliant. They’ve gone and thrown all the ingredients together, into one super-cool retail cocktail. Designing colour-coded boxes for Eye Candy’s collections of top-brand designer eyewear, the Belgium-based agency have in turn used the packaging as the key element of the store’s interiors… purchase the product and you take with you a part of the interior design. The focal element of the shop’s design becomes the shopping bag, the ‘take-home’ marketing, and the packaging for Eye Candy’s “extra goodies”, (cleaning spray, cleaning cloth, etc.). The embodiment of great design; Creneau’s Eye Candy store is a complex and astutely conceived idea, yet in practice is the height of simplicity…