ce comes from the person buying it, the customer,” said Hoffman. ACRD specialises in design and innovation consultancy, which is exactly what it did for its client Just Jeans, an Australian retail staple that has been part of the landscape for over 55 years. Just Jeans is part of Apparel Brands, which also includes Jay Jays, Portmans, Dotti, and Jacqui E, which Myer acquired from Premier Investments last year.  “We really focus on what’s the brand story? Where does it come from? What’s its intent? What purpose does it want to deliver? How does it communicate to a customer?” Hoffman said. “We take all those pieces, put them into a melting pot and out of that comes fixtures that have a purpose, that display the product the right way, colours and finishes that are reflective of the brand’s personality,” he continued. The design and execution of Just Jeans’ refurbished Highpoint store is an example of this process. Balancing storytelling and outfitting Typically, a rebrand, or rebirth in this case, of a retailer with more than half a century of history would involve a hefty backlog of catalogues to provide quality references.   “You would have thought they’d have an archive of history on Just Jeans, right?” Hoffman said. “It’s probably hidden away somewhere, but no one could find it,” he added. Instead, the ACRD team did what anyone would do, they turned to the internet and revisited the Craig Kimberley era of Just Jeans. Kimberley co-founded the brand in 1970 and helped build it into a national retail chain before selling it to a private equity firm in 2001. The new Highpoint Just Jeans store nods to the brand’s heritage with the old Just Jeans logo in neon lights, denim change room curtains and an old school walk-up denim bar. “People do have anxiety about shopping for a brand or walking into a store because they may go, ‘I can’t afford this’, or ‘I don’t feel good about it’ or ‘It’s not right for me’,” Hoffman said. “The moment all those barriers are gone is the moment someone enters and feels really comfortable here – and all of a sudden their shoulders have dropped, and they’re looking at products in a different way,” he elaborated. That’s the emotional shift Hoffman and ACRD set out to create for Just Jeans. “You’ll notice the counters in the middle of the store… We’ve done that for a purpose, and that purpose was to open up wall spaces so the customer can go on a journey that is a clockwise circuit around the store,” Hoffman shared. “When you’re entering the store, you’re getting what Just Jeans are doing from a fashion perspective – but then as you move through the store, you’re going to see outfitting and you’re going to see wardrobing,” he added. According to Hoffman, who has decades of experience in store design, Australian retailers should always lead with their women’s collections on the left, since Australians are used to driving on the left-hand side of the road, as well as moving in a clockwise direction. “Women in general are creatures of habit – they will always tend to go to the left side when entering space – so we purposefully put women on the left and men on the right,” Hoffman stated. Beyond the merchandising and outfitting, ACRD focussed on storytelling throughout the Highpoint Just Jeans store through details almost imperceivable to the average customer’s eye. “You’ll find through the design, there’s a definite separation in the floor plate, and it’s very difficult to see but it works,” Hoffman said. “We changed the floor finishes and we changed ceiling finishes from what would be deemed the fashion area to the denim area –  we are acclimatising the customer that all of a sudden there’s a change in the store,” he added. ACRD brought Just Jeans into the new age, after observing that the brand hasn’t had an update in a decade or so, by creating a denim precinct within the store, allowing the brand to talk to its past, but also step into the future.  Hoffman believes the next step for Just Jeans is to capture what ACRD has done and apply it to key locations and be present for its current customers and new customers. “I do know that Highpoint is probably one of the best performing locations at the moment,” concluded Hoffman. “I haven’t been given the actual numbers, but I know it’s really performing very well, and the uptake has been super positive for them, so I would suggest that they will roll it out.”