Promoting Wellness in Physical Environments

This PSFK guide is a wellness in store design report that outlines strategies to innovate the experience and design of retail offerings in order to support consumers along their journey to live a well-balanced life within a healthy, productive environment.

Executive Summary

Consumers have come to understand and recognize the all-encompassing importance that the design of physical environments and systems have on their individual health and wellness. This increasingly holistic prioritization of a well-balanced environment is leading to drastic shifts in expectations around the physical spaces consumers occupy, and the twinned importance of cleanliness and health. As shoppers continue to embrace and learn more about their own physical health and safety, the environments and ambient stimuli they’re surrounded by and engage with have become central areas of focus. A growing appreciation for health-optimized spaces and personal wellbeing, paired with intensified focus placed on both health and safety is driving new interest in practices, devices and architecture that support safety, cleanliness and personal well-being.

Report Overview

In this report, the PSFK iQ research team dissects the ways brands and retailers can innovate the experience and design of their offerings in order to support consumers along their journey to live a well-balanced life within a healthy, productive environment. To help our members better understand the trajectories at play in this increasingly important space, PSFK has identified 4 key trends-led strategies for store design that bring together the best of technology and the natural world to foster health, wellness, and growth.

What You’ll Learn In This Report

• How retailers have a fresh take on lighting, air quality, soundscapes and materials to create spaces that work in synergy with natural rhythms to promote greater health and happiness within often chaotic urban environments.
• How architecture and engineering practices are embracing new design principles that highlight balance and regeneration.
• Why new technologies are being developed and deployed in a variety of ways to ensure the cleanliness and safety of public and private spaces.
• How vertical gardens and other growing solutions are extending seasonality and further shrinking the distance that food must travel to get to a plate, as well as increasing the sustainability impact individual’s can have at home.
• Why many consumers are seeking a return to nature as a way to slow down and embrace calm and quiet.

What’s In This Report?

To help our community of retail industry change-makers better understand the trajectories at play in this increasingly important space, PSFK has identified 4 key trends-led strategies that brands and retailers can use to improve the experience and design of their offerings in order to support consumers along their journey to live a well-balanced life within a healthy, productive environment.

This wellness in store design report provides:

• 4 trends at the intersection of nature and wellbeing
• 15 best-in-class examples from organizations leading the way through innovation
• Consumer insights around changing behaviors and expectations around cleanliness and wellbeing

Who Prepared This Report?

This report on integrating wellness in store design was developed by the same PSFK research department that since 2004 has provided trends-led innovation consulting advice to Apple, BMW, Facebook/Meta, Google, Microsoft, Samsung and Volkswagen.

Published on: Nov 14, 2021