Reimagine Retail Design Experience With Mortar & More
Irish company, Mortar & More, is an award-winning international retail and hospitality design studio based in Dublin. Recognised by the Fitout Awards for their work for in healthcare and workplace, Mortar & More have come away with recognitions and awards for their work completed with Dental Care Ireland and Udemy Dublin and have been shortlisted for numerous others.
Founded by Liz Dolan and Rob Tracey in 2014, Mortar & More works with retail and hospitality brands to create interactive and engaging spaces, that align and elevate the client’s brand values. Recent Irish projects include Coopers Corner bar and restaurant, Dudley’s Bar, Udemy’s European HQ in Windmill Lane and Happy Teeth in The Hermitage. International clients include Nitro in San Francisco, and a future retail banking concept in the US. More recently the studio has begun development of a Metaverse experience for a client overseas which will see them gaining further experience of project delivery in this space. Mortar & More is a business to watch.
Creative Director, Liz Dolan, is a global design trends guru. She is passionate about omnichannel retail brands that exist both online and, in a brick-and-mortar environment. Shopping centres as a centre for community is a key trend she champions. When designing for Gen Z she stresses the importance of considerations around legacy, loyalty, and trust and how these are reflected in retail experiences. The rise of wellness as a category in major US and European department stores is another trend she identifies.
Commenting, Liz Dolan said:
“A lot of our projects during Covid were overseas. Without being able to travel to meet clients in real life, we had to develop new ways of presenting, so we went straight to virtual reality (VR) and developed our designs so that they could be presented through VR. This allowed clients to immerse themselves within the environment and enabled their teams to walk the space together via the VR headset. This organically led to the studio designing spaces and experiences for clients within the Metaverse.”
Mortar & More creates spaces that can live both physically in brick-and-mortar buildings, while providing a complementary virtual experience for brands. These virtual spaces can provide a future vision where brands can explore and develop alternative environments and experiences for customers. In some instances these experiences may be deployed within the physical store or they may sit in parallel leveraging one environment off the other. This also provides the ability to put the customer at the forefront, creating a virtual environment that can provide valuable interactions and allowing them to become and feel like a valued part of the brand community.
Rob Tracey, co-founder of Mortar & More says ‘The design process, like any collaborative project, starts by truly understanding the brand and the challenges. Mortar & More can then execute a space that not only meets the needs of the client but foresees the challenges and creates built-in solutions. Working as a full-service team, we combine all our expertise to look at designing for the space, the user interactions, and the comfort, as well as looking at how to make any experience in that space individual and relevant to both the user and the client. It’s a process our team really engages in from first meeting to end results’.
