How we built our store in Munich

How do you open a physical store in the middle of a pandemic, with no experience and no budget to speak of? Probably not at all! We did it anyway and today we are very proud of the result.

It must have been sometime in late summer 2020 when, over a few beers, we decided to add a local store to our BandWerk online presence. A small commercial property had become vacant right around the corner from our workshop in Munich, so we simply had to strike it.

In retrospect, that was of course very naive, but you could also say adventurous and impulsive. In fact, many of our ideas come about with the motto "just do it and see what happens" and without this basic attitude we probably wouldn't be where we are today.

So there we were, a few weeks later, with the rental agreement signed, in a 400 square feet room with a linoleum floor and dirty walls.

Neither of us had any retail design experience and a professional interior designer was way beyond our tight budget. So we had to get creative.

Of course the store should be cool; young yet luxurious: maybe a mixture of Apple and Aesop store. The scarce space had to be used efficiently so that we could display our complete product portfolio, while at the same time each product had to have enough space to stand for itself. Under no circumstances should the store feel crammed.

The first ideas were created with a ballpoint pen on a sheet of paper. Now we knew what the store was going too look like.

We needed an imposing table in the center for our watch bands and small wooden panels for our iPhone cases and other products on the wall.

So eventually we could start with the furniture. It is probably not necessary to mention that it should of course be as inexpensive as possible and still look presentable.

Can we build a solid wooden table by ourselves? As always, the motto was: "Let's just try it". We benefited from the "Bauhaus Blox system", which helps building the structure of wooden furniture using various stencils and connecting parts and makes it (relatively) idiot-proof.

Quite frankly, not everything went as smooth as it might appear here.

The first problem: Of course, even the simplest Blox system does not replace the professional carpenter. In the end, our table, for example, was so uneven that we had to grind it for several hours a day for a week to get a reasonable table surface.