A furniture house gave me fifty of its ten thousand square metres, and wanted to see whether fashion would carry itself on their floor. Concept, buy, build, run.
Half a percent of the floor carried a sixth of the house.
50 m² of a 10,000 m² concept storeOf total store revenue · 03–07/2025
The question. What makes a floor sell — the brands standing on it, or the people who actually walk past it?
There was no fashion floor. There was a corner of a furniture house and a question about whether one belonged there. So the work ran in the order it had to: a concept first, then the range, then the room itself.
I built the space with my own hands. The arches on the wall, the torsos mounted into them, the grid wall — key interior elements conceived and physically executed, not ordered from a shopfitter. A concept only becomes a floor when someone puts it up.
Then the buy: roughly ten brands, sourced through a wholesale platform and chosen against one constraint that had nothing to do with taste: everyone walking past had come to look at furniture. The range had to earn its attention from that traffic, not from the customer a fashion floor normally counts on.
Conversion figures decided the rest — layout and assortment moved against what they showed, not against what looked strongest on the wall.
The operational side came with it — warehousing and inventory processes, co-developed and set up alongside the floor, so it could be restocked without me standing in it.
The floor, as a magazine
Twenty-four photographs from those five months — the fashion concept and the display rooms of the house around it, set as spreads. Turn the pages here, or open it full screen.
The floor is a hypothesis. The till is the test.
A range that is assembled once and then defended stops learning. The figures were the check on my own taste: which fixtures held people, what left the floor, what had not moved at all.
What had stopped moving came off the floor. That is uncomfortable when it is a piece you bought yourself, argued for, and hung in the best spot — and it is the only part of the job that reliably earns money. The correction is the work; the buy is only the opening move.
The brands are not named here. In buying, discretion is part of the work.
- Concept
- Drawn, then physically built
- Buy
- ~10 brands via wholesale
- Read
- Conversion → layout & assortment
- Ops
- Warehousing & inventory, co-developed
The floor is a hypothesis. The till is the test — and the range gets rewritten in between.
One floor over. The house around those fifty square metres sells furniture — and in the same five months its display rooms were mine as well.
Same job, different product. Decide what stands next to what, and let the room say it without a sign: a colour that carries across two metres, a surface that answers the one beside it, a light that makes a fabric look like what it costs.
Furniture is slower than fashion and more honest about it — nobody buys a sofa on impulse. A staging has to survive a second visit two weeks later, which rules out every trick that only works once.
Before this, six months in the same trade on the other side of the cycle. I ran the clearance for a closing furniture store in Hamburg — a sell-through strategy for the run-down, inventory analysis and data quality feeding the reporting and the liquidation decisions, plus POS and merchandise control.
Buying teaches you what to bring in. A closure teaches you what it costs when the answer was wrong.