Gentle monster
In August, L Catterton Asia, backed by the French giant, invested around 60 billion won ($53.17 million) in Gentle Monster, becoming the second-biggest shareholder of the firm. While the concept for the stores changes each year, this year’s concept is about the universe and aliens.įrench luxury goods giant LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton has seen the value in the brand’s flagship store strategy. “We are not really making the space to sell something, but to deliver our spirt,” he said about the six branches across the nation and 10 more around the world. Oh stressed that flagship stores are not just about selling products. We are not really seeing this as profitable but this is fun, a part of our ultimate imagination.” “We are developing 50 models every season and 20 of them are in the third generation. “Third-generation products are hard to wear in real life, but they are attractive on Instagram and to celebrities,” Oh said. Each generation has a different purpose and concept. Gentle Monster produces three types of sunglasses, categorized as first-generation, second-generation and third-generation products. We want (our customers) to look gentle but have great passion and enthusiasm inside,” Oh said. “The brand has a specific customer role model - a gentle monster. The name stands for the combination of ultimate imagination and interpretation of the world. Oh and Kim Han-kook founded I.I Combined, the owner and operator of Gentle Monster, in 2011. “We thought, if we make something special and unique, people might love us,” he said. It was pretty much the same, controlled by a few major giants who have factories and retail shops,” Jay Oh, one of the two founders, said at an event hosted by the French Korean Chamber of Commerce and Industry in central Seoul on May 29. “The eyewear market has a long history, but it has not been changing in Korea. Originally in English education, they looked into what kind of market they could stand the chance to be profitable. each of these will have their own stylised environment and a diverse range of materiality, while the clean terrazzo walls and floors serve to contrast the brutalist building and exposed structure.The brand’s founding story is not so typical, as its two co-founders weren’t exactly in love with sunglasses. finally, the basement floor includes twenty-four dioramas, housing the restaurant concessions. the visitor enters this space by way of a tunnel clad in a backdrop of LED screens displaying planetary landscapes.
The third floor of SKP-S is a curated, fantasy interpretation of life on planet mars. the second floor changes the tempo with a bright, light-flooded environment, brutalist architectural detailing, and art installations populating the circulation spaces. the ground floor is dark and moody with a slick, black opacity running through all the surface treatments and focal lighting. Sybarite and gentle monster design each level of the new SKP-S beijing store with its own artfully futuristic atmosphere. each of the store’s four levels is designed with its own unique identity and stylized ecosystem to offer the visitor an otherworldly universe, achieved through a careful palette of materials, lighting, robotics, and art installations. Sybarite and gentle monster curate an experiential dichotomy between SKP-S and the beijing streets outside to create an immediate atmospheric shift.
the main five hundred square meter entrance hosts a non-commercial space dedicated to an expansive art installation curated to transport the customer into another world. SKP-S, which celebrated its opening in december 2019 opposite the existing SKP beijing flagship store, takes visitors on a journey across four floors of a stylised, alternate universe. sited in china, the new luxury department store SKP-S is a retail concept designed to disrupt the current luxury department store typology. Continuing its extensive work for high end retailer SKP, london-based architecture firm sybarite collaborates with cult south korean brand gentle monster with SKP-S beijing.