ZIPLAB Off-line Store, China by PMT Partners // PMT Partners

Text description provided by the architects.

Chaohong Database, A Tail-eating Gluttonous Snake Game.Production today is not merely the production of products, but also the production of consumer desire and consumer passion as well as the production of consumers. —— BaudrillardWith the iteration of consumption and the continued alienation of consumer hierarchy, new words and symbols are continuously created and then consumed.

In the 1960s, Guy Debord wrote that spectacle construction has become a key link in a consumerist society and the decisive structure in the mode of material production has started to shift to the image-oriented mode of spectacle production. 50 years later, the popularization of the mobile internet and the explosion of information make spectacle construction increasingly fast and diverse and make everyone present a participant and builder of consumption spectacle.

ZIPLAB is a cross-border e-commerce offline experience store within the business ecosystem of Onion Global and tries to create a brand-new economic circle for young users. Beijing Road Store in Guangzhou and Haikou Wanda Store, as the presentations of the same series, aim to explore how to build the link between people and products, establish the interaction between people and achieve the integration between man and scene, thus creating greater traffic value and generating more experiential social consumption, through symbols, metaphors and spectacle construction in the contemporary context.

Cross-border e-commerce going from online to offline is a process similar to file compression, which needs to put as many as products and cultures as possible in a space; while in bricks-and-mortar stores, leading offline experience back to online traffic is a process of decompression, which makes consumers learn about the powerful endorsement behind the brand and offers consumers with more choices online.Beijing Road Store, GuangzhouZIPLAB Beijing Road Store in Guangzhou is designed based on the concept of “Database”, and parallels in-store experience path and brand storyline.

The store is divided into three zones: Archive Hall, Charging Tower, and Data Vault.ARCHIVE HALLIn the towering archive hall in the entrance, the acrylic wall vertically supports the entire hall; while the jewelry cabinet horizontally extends through the entire store. As the protagonist of the entry space, this compressed jewelry wall, as the leading part in the entrance, is like the “arsenal” blown open in a game, where players choose their own equips according to their preferences and attributes.

Besides sales function, the entire space offers consumers a brand-new scene for independent exploration.The two axial dislocations formed by the vertical acrylic wall and the horizontal stainless-steel cabinet make the far end seem to narrow and strongly directive. Coupled with the guidance of light strips, it effectively resolves the diversion problem of the L-shaped plane turning and leads people to deeper experience.The antechamber ingeniously forms a front section and a back section through angular dislocation and the partition of the acrylic wall, enabling waiting area, pickup area, blind boxes and other extra spaces to hide behind; the impending LED screen aside continuously shows ZIPLAB’s attitude of selecting the best things in the world.CHARGING TOWERThe Charging Tower is in the center of the entire store and is the lobby to the vault; here is the process of unzipping a compressed file and the place where the product barcodes explode and scatter.

The fragmented installation on the top is like an exploded energy board, clustering and concentrating in the burly illuminant cylinder. The shelves on both sides are placed symmetrically, layer upon layer and ascending like a hill.DATA VAULTInto the Data Vault, this mysterious space surrounded by illuminants is like a treasure vault.

The center of the space is a data transmission tower which symbolizes time and space, and it is like a precision instrument that connects the online and the offline. The luminous wall generates a virtual image that extends infinitely through upper and lower mirrors, implying the cyberworld. Haikou Wanda StoreFor Haikou Wanda Store, under the same series as ZIPLAB Guangzhou Road Store, its plane layout further interprets the shopping experience where online and offline, zipping and unzipping are interconvertible.

The treasure vault in the central position is like a zipped file and is unzipped into folders of story scenes after downloaded, which contains a vast number of product files in different formats where consumers search and consult matched data according to their preferences, then make a purchase and form images and upload to the lab for cloud sharing.

Treasure Database It is like searching data from folders layer by layer, then following the ascending shelves into the treasure database embosomed by mirrors; this extremely compressed space presents a slightly surreal scene through multiple reflections and brings people immersive and futuristic consumer experience.Ingredient LabZIPLAB “selects” and “amplifies” related categories in the professional supply chain, and subdivides them according to the chemical composition of products, forming a unique consumer group.

The space design of this part further stresses the concept of “LAB”, and the lab-themed scenes display ZIPLAB’s ability to continuously improve its selection of products worldwide. International Species WarehouseAt the end of the experience, a space called “International Species Warehouse” is set up to link offline and online images, so that the offline experience can effectively generate online traffic.

Through the columnar transmitter and explosively dislocated streaming media, the consumers offline can see the punch-in images uploaded by consumers online. According to the preferences of offline consumers, the cloud pushes more online choices of categories.Each of us has inevitably become a participant and builder of spectacle image, and will inevitably influence and even determine the landscape of future together.

ZIPLAB is our reflection on the spectacle image of the contemporary consumer society. We try to use a closed-loop consumer perspective to create an infinite loop of online and offline and compression and decompression, just like an experimental tail-eating gluttonous snake game.Project Information:Project Name: ZIPLAB Off-line StoreDesign Firm: PMT Partners Ltd.Website: www.pmt-partners.comContact E-mail: pmtpartners@163.comPrincipal Architects: HU Yan , ZENG Zhe , ZHAO WeihaoProject Director: GU Zhenlin, LIN Mianshi Design Team: GUAN Haozheng, LIN Yongjun, PANG Cheng, CHEN YihuiPhotographs: ZENG Zhe.Client: Onion Global.

ZIPLAB Off-line Store, China by PMT Partners Gallery