The Conran Shop x It's Nice That

Have you visited the Metaverse recently?

The Graphical Tree was commissioned by long-term customer The Conran Shop to produce the graphics for their collaboration with It’s Nice That – Meet Me in the Metaverse. The piece is an immersive installation that takes place at the world-renowned design store’s Chelsea location. 

The Conran Shop is home to considered, curated design, and was founded by Sir Terence Conran in 1973. (Watch out for some 50 year celebrations for next year no doubt).

It’s Nice That invited a host of global artists to reimagine Conran Shop design classics so that within Meet Me in the Metaverse, the digital and physical design world collide in a ‘playful exploration of design’s role in an intriguing new virtual world.’

For the event which runs until mid-October 2022, we helped transform the Conran store’s facade, windows and interior into an exciting experiential landscape to captivate the passerby and event participants alike.

It’s Nice That curated a broad range of future-thinking and digitally focused artists to recreate a specific item from The Conran Shop’s AW22 collection. Each of these creators used the classic pieces as an opening and opportunity to dive into the narrative behind this original product and take inspiration from materials, time period, and the original purpose of the object they had been assigned to explore. 

In a playful exploration of the physical and the digital, visitors to the store are greeted by a series of screens displaying six virtual product designs within a Metaverse-inspired blacked-out environment. This entrance wall monolith was printed on black back canvas for maximum depth of darkness, enhancing the vibrancy of the digital imagery displayed on the screens and highlighting some of the original pieces of furniture that inspired the creations.

Attendees are welcomed into a new seemingly endless space that our printed black canvas backdrop helps to convey.

It’s Nice That describes the installation event as, ‘Across a myriad of immersive screens, users see the fun, free and personality-laden work of VR sculpting duo Yonk, who have turned Pierre Paulin’s sculptural lounge chair –the Groovy Chair – into a chair that grooves. Meanwhile, Parisian 3D art director Laurent Allard creates a 3D clone of the Iris Lounge Chair with a surprisingly flammable twist.’ You can learn more about these never-before-seen creative digital commissions. 

In addition to the interior canvas we also produced a series of internal descriptive printed wallpaper graphics, along with the exterior store facade graphics using a Pro Light-Stop vinyl. Now, this media isn’t designed for print purposes, but as we like to play with the possibilities of print, we sampled this to Conran, before deciding to push ahead. A bit of large format display graphics R&D later and we were ready to go. If you don’t try, how do you know if it will work or not, right?

Needless to say, it was a really exciting brief to work on, being involved with a design icon and seeing a glimpse into the future at the same time. Print still has such an important part to play in how brands and the public interact with an event and a display. Digital goes a long way to draw people in, but you also need the supporting apparatus to complete the idea and bring the concept together.

Having worked on, and added valuable knowledge and expertise, to a number of high-profile and high footfall events over the years including London Fashion Week, Wired and Picasso and Paper at the RA, it’s great to see display graphics continue to thrive when a lot of people thought print might be dead (as if).

To read more about the project head over to the It’s Nice That special Meet Me in the Metaverse page.

Photography by Benjamin Swanson

Please get in touch if you would like The Graphical Tree to work with you on your own event, windows, and campaign displays.

You can call us on 020 7580 4405, or email us here ~ print@thegraphicaltree.com