Butterwood: Marrying Thoughtful Design and Retail Mindsets for a Sustainable Future
Butterwood is an innovative design agency with a retail mindset for physical space. Butterwood is Architecture and Interior Design combined with Brand Strategy. We help people who think about physical spaces to understand the human experience layer that determines business success. We don't just design spaces, we design experiences.
Design is about more than creating a visual impact, good design is aesthetically pleasing but also unobtrusive and simple. Good design is innovative, useful and helps people understand things that are complex. Good design is honest, long-lasting and environmentally-friendly.
Aesthetics without substance or meaning is temporary, disposable and wasteful. In modern retail, the temporary aesthetic has overwhelmed good design, and this is creating many wasteful and disposable outcomes.
We love retail, we want to see it thrive and grow. People depend on retailers for the things we all need to live our lives. Respecting customers means respecting the environment and doing all that you can to minimise your impact.
This is a design problem, designers are needed by retailers for their thoughtfulness. We started Butterwood because we want to eliminate and reduce waste with great design.
Thoughtful Designers craft experiences that resonate on a human level and spark joy. Thoughtful Design makes more money. It attracts strangers into your business for the first time. Thoughtful Design engages prospects with stories about your business, your brand and how your product could be a meaningful part of their life. Thoughtful Design turns strangers and prospects into customers, retail is the business of connecting, joining, signing up, transacting, buying. Thoughtful Design drives your business, and the world, forward.
In spite of the digital revolution, most purchases are still made in physical retail spaces - because humans crave experiences. A desire for experiences drives us out into the world, and we often end up at a retailer, buying something.
Thoughtful Designers are needed to reimagine physical spaces from the perspective of the modern retailer. We need designers who think about attracting strangers, engaging prospects and connecting customers. When design is rooted in thoughtfulness, it becomes transformative, creating experiences that resonate on a human level, and ultimately, driving monetary value.
If a retail business depends on continuous product innovation to drive customers into physical spaces - it is incredibly unsustainable. Bulk selling necessitates large-scale manufacturing processes, extensive use of materials and a significant amount of carbon emissions. The sell-through rates of a new product range can often be minuscule.
Brands can be damaged by availability of discounted product, so the vast majority of a poorly conceived range, new colour-way or boring product feature, ends up in landfill. Any brand that relies on high product turnover has an emerging publicity problem, as customers seem to be several steps ahead of businesses when it comes to sustainability.
Designing a compelling experience into your physical spaces is the solution to this sustainability problem. If customers are attracted into your branded retail location for the experience, your brand will have no problems securing sales at a premium. Perhaps your customer doesn’t even need more of your products; maybe there’s even money to be made taking some products back from customers. Could your business join customers in finding further usage of the things you make or sell?
“Physical retail will remain essential to any successful, future-focused strategy because of the uniquely human emotions and actions these experiences inspire” Warwick Heathwood, AdWeek
We are Architects, Interior Designers and Brand Strategists. We want to design more vibrancy, purpose and inclusiveness into public places. But we also want to design out unsustainable practices that generate waste harm the environment. Our philosophy is thoughtfulness, our approach is retail first and our entire practice is always about sustainability.
Thoughtful Design is Butterwood’s overarching design philosophy.
Thoughtful Design is really just a different way of saying ‘design thinking’, which is central to our design philosophy and daily life. We begin with empathy for users, define, indicate, prototype, test and learn. We use a variety of frameworks and tools, developed by designers and published in books, journals and ephemera over the last 70 years. Great design results from careful consideration (or thoughtfulness), this is true of ancient designers and it remains true today.
Thoughtful Design also means adding in extra layers. Butterwood is architecture and design with the added extra layer of brand strategy. Strategists think about the human layers, all the things that make up an experience: memories, perceptions, motivations, emotions, cognition and connections. We also find and add in extra layers from other disciplines to make our designs more thoughtful. Experts in any space: landscaping, technology, lighting, music, community engagement, cultural integration - these are all thoughtful designers and we want to collaborate with them all.
But most importantly, Thoughtful Design means putting sustainability at the centre of our design practice. There are no central processes or framework to follow here. While there are many exemplars of effective sustainable designs in retail, every store can’t look like an Aesop apothecary. Retail brings vibrancy in the form of diversity and uniqueness into public spaces. Thoughtfulness is the critical missing element that can make all of retail more sustainable: 1) Design in durability and make things that last longer. 2) Design out wasted, toxic materials and wasted energy. Architects and designers of public spaces have been thinking about these things for decades. It’s time to bring all of that thoughtfulness into retail spaces and experiences.
Butterwood applies design thinking while always thinking about your prospects and your sales.
Retail spaces instantly transform people from an anonymous target audience member into an individual prospect. A retail store can bring a complete strangers into your business and they can leave moments later as a customer, a collaborator or a friend. Other digital technology can act like a proxy for this relationship building process. But real friendships are made in person, face to face. Butterwood is always thinking about how your public spaces can convert people from a bunch of binary data points into a physical connection with your brand or business. It’s not about getting better at making content, it’s about getting better at making friends. Great design makes friends.
Design thinking is all about thinking about the user - human centred design. When we start thinking about a project we are always thinking about humans as shoppers. A shopper is the modern version of a human acting like a hunter gatherer. Leaving the home in search of food and other goods is an evolutionary process, something we have always done. Shopping is a universal human activity, like eating, we all do it. We begin everything with empathy for the shopper: Are they rich and bored? Are they hardworking and in a time crunch? Are they looking to get stuff and go home? Are they exploring? How does this doorknob help a shopper open this door? Do they have bags in their other hand? Should this door be automatic to help them? Empathy.
Every business has one or more model hardwired into their retail space by the specifics of the product/service they offer. Apparel buyers need change rooms. Grocery buyers need baskets, trolleys and bags. Car buyers need tyres to kick. Mobile phone plan buyers need to sit down and read through a contract with an assistant before signing it. Brand strategists are needed to understand the model, the human insights and motivations that make it all work for the business. Designers need to understand systems that must be integrated into the space. It’s actually pretty easy to create something innovative as long as it doesn’t handle enough people or isn't repeatable. Scalability and Repeatability are central to the retail mindset, there’s no point making the best store in the world if you can only do it once, at one place.
Australia needs thoughtful retail design in systems and construction/demolition of fit-outs.
Be more thoughtful in all of your design choices. Increase longevity by designing things better to reduce wear and tear in busy retail environments. Think about the durability of materials, like flooring, don’t choose anything that won’t last. But the much bigger thought here is to design enduring destinations, that are flexible, adaptable and capable of hosting many different experiences. Don’t build a showroom for your products, build an entertainment destination for your customers. Invite them into your spaces to do anything and everything that could be connected to what you sell. Give your space a real inclusive purpose that makes it an integral part of the community and precinct it lives in. Design experiences and design retail spaces that can last for decades instead of years.
Unsustainable practices like ‘free return shipping’ intentionally designed in wasteful behaviours and outcomes “I’ll just order three sizes and send two back”. Energy efficiency in fluorescent lit, air-conditioned retail environments is a real problem. We can always begin designing these things out with more thoughtfulness. Toxic materials are being chosen for construction, and they are being sent landfill after demolition. Architects and public space designers are well equipped to make immediate changes now. Set better rules for the design of your spaces. Don’t choose a material until you identify a post-demolition plan for it. Choose materials that are available, without shipping, within a 50km radius of the location. Simple choices like this can decrease the carbon footprint of your entire business, and they also vastly increase opportunities for reuse and recycling.
Australia's circularity rate of 5.4% is lower than the global average of 7.2%. Construction and demolition waste is the largest source of waste in Australia, it has increased by 22% since 2016-2017 (ABS), it accounts for more than 40 percent of the nation’s overall 62 million tonnes of ‘core’ waste. (National Waste Report 2020). Construction and demolition produces the same amount of core waste as all other industry sectors combined. Retail fit-outs need to be discussed in conversations about the circular economy. We need to develop more data on retail’s contribution to the construction and demolition waste volume problem. We know that reuse and recycling of residential building materials is much higher than that of commercial and industrial buildings (ABS). If we examine and build data across the 50 year life cycle of a retail building, we will discover that the interior fit-out is very likely to have been replaced 5-10 times, maybe more. Retail, as a sector, needs to begin generating more data about construction and demolition, we need contractors and suppliers thinking about sustainability and how to generate more data. Before choosing a material for a retail construction project, develop a clear plan for where it will go after demolition, then track it all. Create and share data about that journey for others to learn from and iterate. If you find a terrible sustainability data story in your business, there’s a real chance all your contemporaries have the same issue - share the challenge, join up, work together. Obviously this is going to take some time, so we all need to get started on this now. Everyone needs to support businesses who are dedicated to changing unsustainable business models, we need to appreciate the risks they are taking and celebrate their gains.
We really are all in this together: Architects; Designers; Strategist; Builders; Demolishers; Retailers and Customers.
Emma Butterworth, design lead at Butterwood and current Associate Director at Those Architects. Emma brings to both roles over 15 years of experience in creating timeless residential and commercial spaces. Having grown up in Toowoomba and Brisbane, Emma's architectural designs are significantly influenced by the Queensland lifestyle and its close connection with nature. Emma brings her experience gained in San Francisco, New York City and Sydney, home to Brisbane.
Warwick Heathwood is a seasoned strategist in retail and experiential agencies. Prior to co-founding Campfire x in Sydney, he held the position of North America Strategy Head at Set Creative, New York. Warwick has also developed advertising, retail and experiential strategies in leadership roles at renowned firms like Leo Burnett, TBWA, R/GA, and Argonaut in San Francisco, as well as shopper marketing agencies Arc and Integer and global experiential creative agencies Jack Morton Worldwide and Imagination.
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