Header: Riley Snelling
Cozey is a digital native, Montreal-based furniture start-up created in 2020 during the pandemic. In 2023, the disruptive retailer wanted to create its very first physical store and experience center, one that could faithfully translate its ethos, embody its “unique selling proposition,” be strongly differentiated from legacy competitors, and help customers interact directly with its products. The selected location was a vacant streetside space in Queen West Village, Toronto, Canada.
Brandscaping Cozey
Cozey called upon LAAB architecture to imagine the prototypical flagship, starting with defining the optimal user experience journey and then leveraging the strategic design firm’s singular brandscaping process to refine the store narrative and fix design fundamentals.
No stranger to branded environments, LAAB creative lead Michel Lauzon—whose body of work includes award-winning designs for leading brands such as Adidas, Cirque du Soleil, and Ubisoft—directed the strategic design flow, integrating concurrent input from ad agency Cossette, which crafted the brand identity and developed the graphic design components for their digital and physical realms.
Beyond the interior architecture, LAAB’s creative team also conceived the space’s integrated furniture, from display platforms to shelving and design center materials’ cubicles, as well as the visual merchandising strategy for the furniture collections.
Physical retail gets “Cozey”
The result is a next-generation store totally merging the digital and physical channels. It features no on-site storage, no cash registers, and in-store display products acting as physical avatars as the purchasing is exclusively online. The design approach is both UX and product-focused, starting with a stunning window showcase evoking a giant fabric weave to draw pedestrians inside the space.
The elongated retail space then moves patrons towards the design center at the end, funneling them through successive “rings” inspired by a photographer’s studio’s cyclorama. Beyond enhancing the featured products in each ring, the curved and edge-light backdrops seamlessly flow from floor to ceiling, creating an immersive shape that subliminally evokes generic house room dimensions and proportions without resorting to artificial set pieces like leading furniture retailers.
The result is a deceptively simple yet disruptive retail space that seems to straddle the digital and the physical. It deftly subverts conventional retail paradigms while ensuring the primacy of product over brand, a core Cozey tenet.
The essence of comfort at home
Building on the start-up’s values of innovation and simplicity, LAAB responded to the challenge of “What is Cozy?”, postulated at the onset, by crafting a wholly integrated brand and product physical experience—a cross between a streetside store, brand experience space, and design centre—creating both a highly functional and intimate space: one that embodies the feeling of ultimate comfort at home.
