EP. 85 THE ART AND ZENGENIUS OF VISUAL MERCHANDISING with Joe Baer, CEO / Creative Director, ZenGenius Inc.

ABOUT JOE BAER:

Joe’s LinkedIn profile: linkedin.com/in/joe-baer-4479385

Websites:

zengenius.com 

visual911.com 

Email: [email protected]

BIO:

Joe is the Co-Founder, Creative Director, and CEO of ZenGenius, Inc., an experiential design firm specializing in visual merchandising and event design. Headquartered in Columbus, Ohio, Joe brings over three decades of mastery in innovative leadership and creative direction to the design, visual merchandising and special events industries. 

He has extensive knowledge of the customer journey from working in stores for decades and is a seasoned public speaker who has traveled the world to inspire and educate others through the art of visual merchandising, design and special events.

Additionally, Joe has contributed his retail know-how to multiple publications, authored The Art of Visual Merchandising: Short North, and created one of my favorite events in the retail industry the Iron Merchant Challenge, a popular interactive visual merchandising competition held annually at the International Retail Design Conference. 

Joe’s passion for the world of design is evident in his role as President of the PAVE Global leadership board - a 501(c)(3) charitable foundation with the mission to support, connect, and inspire the next generation of professionals in the retail design, visual merchandising, and consumer environments industry. 

He also holds Advisory Board roles at Columbus College of Art and Design and VMSD Magazine. 

SHOW INTRO

Welcome to Episode 85! of the NXTLVL Experience Design podcast…

In every episode we follow our catch phrase of having “Dynamic Dialogues About DATA: Design, Architecture, Technology and the Arts.” 

And as we continue on this journey, we’ll have guests that are thought provoking futurists, AI technology mavens, retailers, international hotel design executives as well as designers and architects of brand experience places.

We’ll talk with authors and people focused on wellness and sustainable design practices as well as neuroscientists who will continue to help us look at the built environment and the connections between our mind-body and the built world around us.

If you like what you hear on the NXTLVL Experience Design show, make sure to subscribe, like, comment and share with colleagues, friends and family.

The NXTLVL Experience Design podcast is always grateful for the support of VMSD magazine.

VMSD brings us, in the brand experience world, the International Retail Design Conference. I think the IRDC is one of the best retail design conferences that there is bringing together the world of retailers, brands and experience place makers every year for two days of engaging conversations and pushing us to keep on talking about what makes retailing relevant. 

You will find the archive of the NXTLVL Experience Design podcast on VMSD.com.

Thanks also goes to Shop Association the only global retail trade association dedicated to elevating the in-store experience. 

SHOP Association represents companies and affiliates from 25 countries and brings value to their members through research, networking, education, events and awards. Check then out on SHOPAssociation.org 

Today, EPISODE 85… I talk with Joe Baer of Zen Genius an experiential design firm specializing in visual merchandising and event design. Joe had spent more than 3 decades working the in the retail industry bringing visual merchandising know-how to the creation of emotionally resonant branded places. Visual merchandising is allot more than simply making things look good in a store. It’s very much about 3D storytelling, sensory experiences, emotions and making places sing as Joe explains.

We’ll get there in a minute but... first a few thoughts…

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Monique worked in the visual merchandising department

she was the director there and I was the director in the interior design department 

our two programs ran concurrently we shared some students across our programs but we seldom actually shared lunch

And so it was slightly strange but intriguing that she invited me to have lunch with her across the street from the college at a little Thai place

We sat down, talked about students and then - more as a throw away - she said “they want me to go to Singapore…”

And I waited for the next sentence.

“But I don't really want to go to Singapore.” she said. “I'd have to leave here. I'd have to leave my son who's thinking about collage a few years and I'd really just prefer to stay in Montreal.”

And then there was a silence.

“Singapore?!” I said.

“I don't even know where Singapore is. That's in Southeast Asia, right? “

“yeah, it's like on the other side of the world.” she said.

“Sounds exotic. I'd go for sure. Besides, I love Chinese food. I could eat it every day.”

“Really?” she said .

“Sure, why not? I'd love to go. I love the whole idea of adventure.” 

“Well anyway,” she said, “I don’t know what they are going to do if I don’t go. It’s to be the Director of the visual merchandising program in an international fashion school and they’ve got no one else who could do it.” 

“No seriously, I’d go. I mean I have no idea about what you do and… I’m a guy and that means genetically I actually don’t like shopping and I’ve only ever designed the escalator and fountain at the Eaton center. 

But let them know that I’d do it.”

We finished lunch, climbed over the snowbank of freshly plowed snow, crossed the street to get back for afternoon classes and a few weeks later I was walking down the stairs of a plane in the stultifying humidity at Changi airport.

Monday morning, I was the program Director of the Visual Merchandising Department at LaSalle International Fashion School … in Singapore… and… I had no idea what I was doing but knew my career had taken a significant and abrupt turn.

The world of retail design had found me, and I never looked back for the next 20 years.

Over those 20 plus years I learned from some masters in retail design and visual merchandising. I arrived in New York after a year, spent an afternoon with Gene Moore, was introduced to Peter Glenn and ended up working with Joe Weishar New Vision Studios. I spent the next four years listening to and watching Joe talk about visual merchandising practice as both art and retail strategy.

For Joe Weishar visual merchandising wasn't just a display tactic but was a creative discipline that blended art, design and retail psychology. 

He merged visual perception and design principles and he would layout a store or a wall with the same mechanics of laying out a composition of a painting – proportions, scale, focal points. He celebrated Visual merchandising as an art form that shaped memorable experiences rather than simply placing products on the shelves

All of those basic art principles were things that I was deeply familiar with. I had been in private art studios that my parents put me in at the age of nine because they recognized my passion for painting.

I had gone to architecture school and spent the first eight years of my career doing traditional architectural projects – museums, libraries, houses, schools… that sort of thing and I taught the design same principles of scale proportion, balance, color, harmony and how you could use those things ultimately to tell a story to students in a College’s interior design program in Montreal.

Even in those early years of my career in the late 90s, I was learning that retail stores needed to be engaging the senses, and we should be thinking about creatively implementing textures, variations in lighting as well as sound and scent and not just focusing on what customers would experience with their eyes.

I was learning that the senses were conduits for emotion and memory - that if you implemented design principles and thoughtful sensory-based visual merchandising elements correctly, that they would help to fill shopping baskets and engage customers in long-term relationships with a brand. 

These sorts of environments that engaged the senses would increase loyalty and invite return visits because, in the end, the store was simply a backdrop, a theater set for the full-bodied experience of a brand where main feature was the merchandise.

If you thought of merchandise as elements in a composition and wrapped them in memorable display moments, it could make stores sing.

This sort of thinking positioned retail as experience design rather than a purely commercial layout. The goods were a necessary part of the equation to be sure, but as I working through the foundational years of a retail design career, I saw that great retail places were more than a depository for stuff to be consumed, they had a palpable emotional resonance, they had soul. 

It was remarkable to me then, as a young retail architect, that we were designing with the purpose of selling…but it was more than that. Great stores fulfilled basic needs, desires and dreams. They were places for relationship building, with people as well as brands.

They were story telling places that helped to message group belonging, wellbeing, connection and status. They were places where displays weren’t random; they were meant to guide customers through a narrative journey. Every element was intentional, geared towards telling a brand story that invited the customer to participate in the story’s unfolding.

All of the effort that the designers, merchants and visual teams put into making the store wasn’t just about “making it look good,” but making it work well. 

The design and visual strategy had to be grounded in retail metrics and customer behavior. In the end, our job as co-authors of this retail experience script was to move product.

We would calculate merchandising units per square foot. We thought about how product would flow through a department from delivery to markdown and how adjacencies were critical – why groups of products were located next to what other products. 

We knew how many units had to sell in a department to make the financials work. There was business behind the beauty. Visual merchandising was a silent seller as author Judy Bell would say.

In my early years, we didn’t think too much about what happened to all the stuff after the store had aged or the season had changed. Graphics, fixtures and display items shifted along with the seasonal changes, holidays or special promotions. And a lot of it just got trashed. 

We began to think more deeply about the sustainability factor of our work and the impact of retail place making on our environment. It was no longer acceptable that the disposable economy would direct the design of store without any consideration for how it was eventually ending up in landfill sites. 

Lighting, manufacturing processes, materials, and lifecycles came under more scrutiny. These days, thinking about the sustainable nature of how we design and build stores is very much at the forefront of our thinking from the get-go.  Design firms are becoming B-Corporations whose mission is to be better stewards of our little blue dot. 

Along the way, teaching - both our clients as well as students in design programs - was something that never left the radar. What had been the precipitating moment - going from teacher to running a visual merchandising program at an international school in Singapore - would remain key to my professional experience. 

And this is where we can bring in my guest Joe Baer   into the story. Joe’s story is so familiar because it is so similar. While we came to the retail world from different angles, our paths have many parallels and similarity in purpose – despite being from different orientations in the retail place-making paradigm.

Joe is the Co-Founder, Creative Director, and CEO of ZenGenius, Inc., an experiential design firm specializing in visual merchandising and event design. 

Headquartered in Columbus, Ohio, Joe brings over three decades of mastery in innovative leadership and creative direction to the design, visual merchandising and special events industries. 

He has extensive knowledge of the customer journey from working in stores for decades and is a seasoned public speaker who has traveled the world to inspire and educate others through the art of visual merchandising, design and special events.

Additionally, Joe has contributed his retail know-how to multiple publications, authored The Art of Visual Merchandising: Short North, and created one of my favorite events in the retail industry the Iron Merchant Challenge, a popular interactive visual merchandising competition held annually at the International Retail Design Conference. 

Joe’s passion for the world of design is evident in his role as President of the PAVE Global leadership board - a 501(c)(3) charitable foundation with the mission to support, connect, and inspire the next generation of professionals in the retail design, visual merchandising, and consumer environments industry. 

He also holds Advisory Board roles at Columbus College of Art and Design and VMSD Magazine. 

Joe leads with passion, purpose, pure joy and believes in celebration so I see our conversation as a celebration of Joe Baer’s commitment to his retail industry involvement.

ABOUT DAVID KEPRON:

LinkedIn Profile: linkedin.com/in/david-kepron-9a1582b

Websites: 

https://www.davidkepron.com    (personal website)

vmsd.com/taxonomy/term/8645  (Blog)

Email: [email protected]

Twitter: DavidKepron

Personal Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/davidkepron/

NXTLVL Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nxtlvl_experience_design/

Bio:

David Kepron the Retail Studio Principal for the architecture and design firm Little (https://www.littleonline.com). He is a multifaceted creative professional with a deep curiosity to understand ‘why’, ‘what’s now’ and ‘what’s next’. He brings together his background as an architect, artist, educator, author, podcast host and builder to the making of meaningful and empathically-focused, community-centric customer connections at brand experience places around the globe. 

David is a former VP - Global Design Strategies at Marriott International. While at Marriott, his focus was on the creation of compelling customer experiences within Marriott’s “Premium Distinctive” segment which included: Westin, Renaissance, Le Meridien, Autograph Collection, Tribute Portfolio, Design Hotels and Gaylord hotels. 

In 2020 Kepron founded NXTLVL Experience Design, a strategy and design consultancy, where he combines his multidisciplinary approach to the creation of relevant brand engagements with his passion for social and cultural anthropology, neuroscience and emerging digital technologies. 

As a frequently requested international speaker at corporate events and international conferences focusing on CX, digital transformation, retail, hospitality, emerging technology, David shares his expertise on subjects ranging from consumer behaviors and trends, brain science and buying behavior, store design and visual merchandising, hotel design and strategy as well as creativity and innovation. In his talks, David shares visionary ideas on how brand strategy, brain science and emerging technologies are changing guest expectations about relationships they want to have with brands and how companies can remain relevant in a digitally enabled marketplace. 

David currently shares his experience and insight on various industry boards including: VMSD magazine’s Editorial Advisory Board, the Interactive Customer Experience Association, Sign Research Foundation’s Program Committee as well as the Center For Retail Transformation at George Mason University.

He has held teaching positions at New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology (F.I.T.), the Department of Architecture & Interior Design of Drexel University in Philadelphia, the Laboratory Institute of Merchandising (L.I.M.) in New York, the International Academy of Merchandising and Design in Montreal and he served as the Director of the Visual Merchandising Department at LaSalle International Fashion School (L.I.F.S.) in Singapore.  

In 2014 Kepron published his first book titled: “Retail (r)Evolution: Why Creating Right-Brain Stores Will Shape the Future of Shopping in a Digitally Driven World” and he is currently working on his second book to be published soon. 

I caught up with Bryan at the SHOP Marketplace event in Charlotte and chatted about his focus on shaping what comes next in digital signage and experiential design.

The NXTLVL Experience Design podcast is presented by VMSD magazine and Smartwork Media. It is hosted and executive produced by David Kepron. Our original music and audio production is by Kano Sound. 

The content of this podcast is copywrite to David Kepron and NXTLVL Experience Design. Any publication or rebroadcast of the content is prohibited without the expressed written consent of David Kepron and NXTLVL Experience Design.

Make sure to tune in for more NXTLVL “Dialogues on DATA: Design Architecture Technology and the Arts” wherever you find your favorite podcasts and make sure to visit vmsd.com and look for the tab for the NXTLVL Experience Design podcast there too.