ISG Retail Week Interiors Awards – Barber Sweet Shop Design up for award

14th November 2014

Hot on the heels of our fun at Cannes, last week we attended another awards ceremony where some of our work – a sweet shop design – was nominated – at the ISG Retail Week Interiors Awards at the Hilton Hotel in London.

Retail Week Awards

Our work with small, independent sweet shop, ‘Sweet as a Button’ was shortlisted along with three other entrants in the ‘Food and Supermarket Design of the Year’ category. Unfortunately we didn’t win, but we were very honoured to be included as our category included big hitters such as the Co-operative and Waitrose. We can honestly say it wasn’t all about the winning as the awards ceremony was a very glitzy and glamorous night to remember – with hundreds of leading retail designers, industry experts and retailers came together to celebrate and honour each others achievements.

Retail Week Awards

Waitrose took the gong in our category for their innovative work at their recently opened store in Swindon where they have been trialling both retail technology ideas and customer engagement with their café and food offering.

Retail Week Awards

By contrast our Sweet as Button design was a retro design, for sisters Miranda and Hayley Button who wanted to open a sweet store that reminded them of their childhood. The design evokes a feeling of nostalgia with enticing curved display racks, period wooden floors and painted furniture alongside retro hexagonal designs and green candy-striped walls. Sweets are available for purchase by weight or in packets with rows of sweets in glass jars lining the walls. The store stocks an impressive assortment of old-school favourites such as sugar mice and flying saucers,  plus the sister’s own handcrafted confectionery – made with British sugar beet in open copper pans. The store was inspired by the Button sisters magical memories of their childhood visits to the village sweet shop – which eventually closed.  Hayley decided that it was something that was missing from the area and she wanted her own child to experience the same sugar-filled magic that she and her sister had felt. So the two sisters set out to create their own retro-styled store with a modern twist.

Sweet as a Button

Sweet as a Button

The overall winner at the awards ceremony as the Fragrance Lab at Selfridges in London, which also won ‘best Pop/VM solution’ and we will be blogging about their unique and exciting idea here on the blog next week!