Case study · Retail design
Getting the next design round ready by morning.
At Skylab I worked on Sorel's retail program for Columbia, and built a rendering workflow that let a small studio keep up with constant design reviews.
The brief
Moving Sorel from snow boot to fashion brand.
Columbia was taking Sorel beyond its work-and-snow-boot roots into a fashion-focused women's line with its own retail presence: shop-in-shops, table displays, and full Sorel stores. I designed displays, shoe walls, tables, and product cards in rich, tactile materials that fit where the brand was headed.
The bottleneck
Keeping up with feedback.
Each design round worked its way up through Columbia to the CEO, and every comment along the way had to show up in the next presentation, often the next day. Sometimes that meant 40 new renderings overnight, more than a small studio could make by hand.
The pipeline
Making the workflow repeatable.
I built a pipeline in 3ds Max and V-Ray, automated through Backburner, with the scenes, lighting, and settings locked in, so any model or material change could re-render the whole set in one click. The images linked straight into the InDesign program book, so an updated presentation was one export away. We turned every revision around the next day without burning out the studio.
More at Skylab
Beyond retail.
During a second stretch at Skylab I worked on hospitality, multifamily, and residential projects, including W Hotels in San Francisco and Seattle, lodges for Canadian Mountain Holidays, multifamily across Portland and the Bay Area, and The Yard at Burnside Bridgehead.