The designer behind the recently launched M+ Shop and The Other Shop, the retail offering at M+, Asia’s first global museum of contemporary visual culture, shares the secrets of how to stand out in a retail environment as competitive as Hong Kong.

Asia is home to some of the most competitive retail spaces in the world, none more so than Hong Kong. With around 50m visitors a year adding to a population of 7.5m in a space roughly the size of New York City or London, it’s become a concentrated retail grouping almost without comparison anywhere in the world.

How does a retailer achieve standout in a city where it’s not unusual to see three Gucci stores on the same block?

This is the question faced by the retail team at M+, Asia’s first global museum of contemporary visual culture, which opened in November of this year. The ways it is finding to rise to that challenge and gain the attention of the over-saturated Hong Kong shopper is a vital lesson for anyone looking to achieve retail success anywhere.

How then to create a retail space that reflects and plays a part in its local community? It began with deep immersion in the locality, and from that came ideas such as the four three-metre-high pavilions, inspired by the traditional Dai Pai dongs of Hong Kong food market stalls, which form the centrepiece of the store and will act as an ever-changing showcase of artists and merchandise.

In the Other Shop, products are displayed in cabinets redolent of a Chinese apothecary. But it’s more than these eye-catching centrepieces. You reflect a locality in all the tiny details. Where most museum shops are white, the M+ Shop uses a colour associated with a popular Chinese soap opera. We used local materials, like clay-effect concrete and bamboo, in our design. The overall sense we aim for is that of a bustling Hong Kong street. We wanted to take it as far as we could from the bland, sombre store people might be expecting.

And this has been carried through into the merchandising strategy. An artist has created a collage of Hong Kong imagery and used it to cover skateboards. Bags are made from fishermen’s nets recycled from a local island.

M+ is far from the only store in the world taking this hyperlocal approach. At other visitor attractions, Londoners have long visited the Tate Modern to buy gifts without entering the collection, and in New York MoMA’s store is known citywide as the place to go for a certain type of highly curated and desirable products. The Pompidou’s retail offering has been embraced by Parisians.

Elsewhere in retail, we’re even seeing the global corporates look beyond the homogenous look and feel typically associated with them. Most notably, Nike Live is now in Tokyo, New York, Los Angeles and London, with plans to roll it out to 250 stores worldwide.

However, there’s so much more that could be done. Wherever you are in the world, from the most competitive space in Hong Kong, to the quietest town anywhere, the key is to think first about who your customers are and what they want from a visit to your store. Work with the assets you have, whether that’s architecture, history, people or something else, and find imaginative ways to bring that to life.

As Kirstin Mearns, Head, Museum Retail and Commerce at M+, concludes: “The challenge with all retail is differentiation, and nowhere more so than in a place like Hong Kong. Achieving that is about

your merchandise, your people and a number of factors, but store design is critical. It needs to add another layer to the story. We hope we’re achieving that here and that our store will become a place Hong Kong citizens and visitors love coming to again and again.”