Some thoughts on Nokia’s Helsinki Flagship store

Brilliant article by "Building"; I suggest you check it out.

Some Snippets:

Nokia’s global network of high-tech outlets is about to hit London. Katie Puckett went to Finland to see if they really make the Apple store look like ‘Little House on the Prairie’

“It’s part of the structure, but we’ve had a huge problem with local contractors finding the right blue – this is the third one we’ve tried,” says Neil Clemson, a director at F+G, who is managing Nokia’s global stores programme. “They’ve always been tinted with green because of the heating process. At the Shanghai store we are going to need six storeys of glass for the facade.”

The blue is important because the stores are all about branding. Nokia doesn’t make mobiles anymore, it makes “devices” and it’s competing not only with traditional rivals like Motorola but with Apple’s iPhone.

“You have to let people touch the real product,” says Clemson. “But you’ve got a very expensive product attached by a little wire. We spent two years developing the alarm system.”

“A couple of years ago, Apple stores were definitely leading the field,” says Wright [A Nokia employee], “but we’ve got much more technology than them. There was a great review in the New Yorker that described the Apple store as ‘Little House on the Prairie’ compared with ours in terms of technology. And by the way, our products are much better than the iPhone,” he smirks.

If the Nokia stores are reminiscent of Apple’s gleaming glass, it may be because they’ve employed the same designer – San Francisco’s Eight Inc. They’ve also specified that the stores have a Scandinavian feel with lots of timber to challenge the misconception that Nokia is Japanese or Korean.