Farmacia Arenal 2, Pallets and cardboard boxes

Year: 2010. Sales Area: 300m2. Location: Madrid, Spain.

Creative re-design of one of the leading pharmacies in Spain and the oldest in Madrid established in 1855

Throughout its history, the Farmacia Arenal2 has forged a reputation for quality of service at a fair price. This is a pharmacy where one has always been able to find everything one needs with attentive expert staff and a range of specialized skin cosmetic products.

Keeping the image fresh and the shopping experience open-ended, without cumbersome engineering, without changing the floor, the ceiling or the lighting.  And with just two months to get the job done, the challenge was a tough one.

Re-design involves making the most of the resources you already have. And that is just what we did. We changed the spatial organization, getting rid of the high shelving units inside that blocked the view, making it easier to get around.  We changed the position of the display cabinets and distributed them around the space so that the customer can find one wherever there was a major product category.

On the walls, we created some new front panels to cover up the existing fittings and we designed a new product presentation for each of the following categories: Cosmetics, Nutrition, Childcare, Oral Hygiene, Natural Medicine, ... We designed a display cabinet in the shape of a cross that was joined by a series of conveyor belts and a "toboggan" to the new robot, creating a mini-show out of the process of dispensing the medications. 

I recall that at the time the last financial crisis was just beginning and one of the aims of changing the image was to convey a perception of a low price while retaining the original style of the venerable Gayoso pharmacy.

Our attention was drawn to an ornamental detail in the original shopfront: a frieze We re-interpreted the original frieze based on our own design made using white vinyl cut to shape that ran along the edges of all of the walls in the pharmacy. We designed some backlit pallets and corporate cardboard boxes to tie in the storage space and presentation of the products on special offer. We built a series of large blackboards to display  health and beauty tips and promotional offers in a quick and approachable way. And so as not to neglect the service aspect, we made portraits of all of the pharmacy staff.