RAPSODIA
When we told our Argentinan friend Augustin that we were heading to Buenos Aires to meet with Rapsodia founders Josefina Helgues and Sol Acuna, his eyes got very big and he blurted out that we were meeting with the most famous women in the city - describing Sol as “the Kate Moss of Argentina”. With this in the back of our minds, we were intrigued to meet them.
Our first impression of them was of two highly creative women who were well-traveled and with impeccable taste. I still remember Josefina’s beautiful vintage embroidered duster coat which she wore at our first meeting at their original store - an old garage opened 20 years earlier - born out of a passion for handmade clothing and travel.
It was at that meeting in a transformed garage that we promised to respect the brand’s free-spirited vision of a global aesthetic. This started with the materials which we proposed; simple and noble - polished cement floors, soft plaster walls, rough wood beams and custom tiles to help create a textured background for the highly embellished clothing. We also brought back the original storefront colour - a warm olive green - which we repurposed in an exterior stucco with unlaquered brass trims that would age with time.
We created a modern shell as well as redesigned and rearranged the perimeter fixtures to both hold more product and help create “zones” where the visual merchandising team could tell smaller, more focused stories. We met with all departments for this project - from design, to operations, to marketing and visual merchants to help understand how they needed the store to work for them.
We also worked with the in-house team to guide them with merchandising tools, and some new ideas for window and table displays as well as sourced artwork from several of our favourite artists in New York and London to further expand on the idea of the global village which is the DNA of the Rapsodia brand.
The store design is now the new store standard for Rapsodia stores in South America and Mexico.
