MONTREAL — Cozey, which started up as an online furniture retailer in 2020 during the pandemic, opened its first retail store -- Cozey Flagship Experience Centre -- on a vacant streetside space in Queen West Village, Toronto.

In 2023, the disruptive retailer decided it wanted to create its first physical store that could faithfully translate its ethos, embody its unique selling proposal, be strongly differentiated from legacy competitors, and help customers interact with its products.

To make this happen, Cozey called upon LAAB architecture to imagine the prototypical flagship, starting with defining the optimal user experience journey and then leveraging the strategic design firm’s singular brandscaping process to refine the store narrative and fix design fundamentals.

LAAB creative lead Michel Lauzon, who’s body of work includes award-winning designs for leading brands such as Adidas, Cirque du Soleil and Ubisoft, directed the strategic design flow, integrating concurrent input from ad agency Cossette, which crafted the brand identity and developed the graphic design components for the digital and physical realms.

Beyond the interior architecture, LAAB’s creative team also conceived the space’s integrated furniture, from display platforms to shelving and design center materials’ cubicles, as well as the visual merchandising strategy for the furniture collections.

The result is a next generation store totally merging the digital and physical channels, featuring no onsite storage, no cash registers, and instore display products acting as physical avatars as the purchasing is exclusively online. The design approach is both UX and product focused, starting with a stunning window showcase, evoking a giant fabric weave to draw pedestrians inside the space.

The elongated retail space then moves patrons toward the design center situated at the end, funneling them through successive “rings,” inspired by a photographer studio’s cyclorama. Beyond enhancing the featured products in each ring, the curved and edge-light backdrops seamlessly flow from floor to ceiling, creating an immersive shape that subliminally evokes generic house room dimensions and proportions without resorting to artificial set pieces like other leading furniture retailers.

The result is a deceptively simple, yet disruptive retail space that seems to straddle the digital and the physical, one that deftly subverts conventional retail paradigms while ensuring the primacy of product over brand, a core Cozey tenet.