Gruskin Group has won an "Award of Merit" in the Retail Design Institute's (RDI) 2008 International Store Design Competition. The competition recognizes outstanding retail design projects completed in 2008. Gruskin and his team received the award in the "Retail Service" category for the Verizon Communications (VZC) Peter Cooper Village Store (PCV) that they designed and opened in 2008 in New York City.
"VZC had become the preferred telecom provider to the PCV community," commented Kenneth A. Gruskin AIA, Principal of Gruskin Group. "They needed to open a store within the PCV neighborhood to support this role and provide a dramatic presentation of their FiOS product in the New York marketplace. Our design for this store incorporated many of the previous learnings we had gathered from creating other Verizon Communications and Verizon Wireless stores, fixtures and customer touch points. Working closely with them on recent projects like their flagship Verizon 'Experience' stores and our continued support of Verizon Wireless's retail channel were instrumental in providing us with the intimate knowledge of their brand, products and customers that provided the underlying basis of the PCV store design."
The unique look of the store initially unfolded as the Gruskin Group team explored the best approaches to provide a captivating and memorable FiOS experience. "When we began to brainstorm how to communicate to customers that FiOS was not just a cable alternative, but something special and ground breaking in its quality, capabilities and experience, we imagined taking them inside the FiOS network like the characters in the movie, 'Tron.' Once inside, they would become surrounded by a FiOS digital river, experiencing the product in an immersive, visceral way," says Gruskin.
The resulting store concept required Gruskin Group to provide Verizon Communications with its full suite of integrated design services in architecture, branding, strategy, interior design, industrial design, graphic design, interactive and IT services to design and execute the new store concept and achieve the project's vision.