Qirtas Shop: Experiential Retail Space

For London Design Festival 2022, Qirtas, a Bahraini-based stationery and concept store aims creates an experiential retail space within Shoreditch Design District. At its core, Qirtas believe in the drama that occurs from putting pen to paper. Through all of its pop up spaces, Qirtas creates a physical personification of this drama through creating spaces that transform the most basic daily tools, such as a pen and paper, to extraordinary creativity superchargers. Setting the scene is an integral part of Qirtas’ ethos. With a team comprised of architects and designers, the space becomes just as important as the products that inhibit it. Through spatial and curatorial design of its stores, Qirtas creates an ‘epiphany-friendly space’ where both products and ideas can thrive. The brand has ventured into furniture and product design alike to create a habitat for its carefully curated and designed products. Through creating experiential retail spaces, Qirtas omits the transactional relationships with its visitors and develops a deeper connection with them, that sparks intrigue, curiosity and as Tom and David Kelly put it “cultivate creative serendipity”. Through experimentation with product, space and materials, Qirtas manifests a culture of play. In Shoreditch Design District, the brand experiments with reflective and chromatic materials to dramatise visitors reflections, pushing them to perceive the imaginative versions of their ideas and potential alike. Materials selected for the design reflect distortions, exaggerated angles and perspectives, allowing the space for visitors to imagine their ideas in the same manner. “We want our customers to feel a sense of relatedness and ownership to the tools that translate their ideas into tangible means. The tools that become the bearers of their ideas, thoughts, and plans”. Qirtas pushes the boundaries of relevance of stationery. Stationery is not just for the creative. A rapid shift to digitisation in both culture and context is inevitable, nonetheless, these still cannot replace the profound physical connection and rapid flow of ideas and expression, when putting pen to paper. Qirtas invites you to join the drama.