Why digital-first furniture brand Tylko chose Berlin for its first physical shop after a decade of online-only

Online retailers often have an edge when it comes to quickly responding to customer or market needs. Everything from virtual shopfronts to branding can be rapidly recalibrated. Bricks-and-mortar outlets, on the other hand, can be slower to adjust. And yet a decade after it began as an online configurator for shelves, Polish brand Tylko has launched its first permanent retail outlet in Berlin.

“Berlin is our biggest market so it made sense to open here. It’s retail but in a very non-commercial way,” says co-founder Ben Kuna, whose Berlin-based team of Max Burrau, Chaewon Sol Song and Marie Munz will share the story of its shelving, sideboards and sofas with locals and visitors. “Rather than just a showroom, we wanted somewhere for the community.”

The architect behind the new Tylko Space is Paul Cournet of Rotterdam-based studio Cloud. “The hardest thing was to design a space for objects from a catalogue that is essentially endless,” he says. His solution was to treat the shop – defined by three rooms – as a kind of “empty box” that can easily be changed and rearranged. Defying the notion that retail interiors are static is a fully LED backlit ceiling that allows the atmosphere to shift in seconds. “You could remove all of the furniture and throw a party, let a single piece take centre stage for a launch or turn the light red at night and let its glow spill out onto the street,” he says. “Retail gets outdated very quickly, so you want to avoid creating a designer space that will feel obsolete in five years.”

A red corridor leads to an oak-lined sample library, then an intimate, salon-like lounge where modular sofas sit alongside custom-designed speakers. The room also features a playful “configuration station” with two haptic knobs that allow visitors to adjust furniture using images projected on the wall. A mezzanine is reserved for more in-depth planning sessions. “All of our six staff members have design backgrounds,” says Kuna. “They can really understand what customers want and feed those insights straight back to our design team in Warsaw.” For all the advantages of online appointments and apps, the lesson from this technology-first start-up is that sometimes it’s good to talk.
tylko.com