Note. for nordstrom
Reimagining the brick-and-mortar shopping experience.
Merchandising | Brand Design | Industrial Design | Print & Pattern Design
While consulting for retailers in the home category, my best friend Daniel and I noticed that many of the objects we owned held personal stories beyond their function. We saw an opportunity in retail to go beyond category-based merchandising and explore product curation through sentiment. This led to a concept focused on designing a shopping experience where everyday items were organized by the meaning they carried.
We designed a sentiment map called the “Confetti Universe,” using confetti’s symbolic link to celebration and emotional expression through color. It centered around four core sentiments to guide retail mapping: Separations (Bon Voyage), Milestones (Let’s Catch Up), Appreciations (So Us), and Consolations (Me Day). These emotional categories were intended to bridge traditional home sections—like Dinnerware, Bedding, Bath, and Cookware—into a more meaningful and story-driven shopping experience.
To bring cohesion to a cross-category merchandising concept, we needed a unifying element to tell a clear story. We developed a brand that tied the assortments together through thoughtful SKUs. Inspired by the importance of ‘thought’ behind the gifts, we named the brand Note, a brand anchored in sentimental value behind the things - just like a handwritten note.
To encapsulate the brand’s goal of delivering a celebration of sentiment, the logo design includes slits, reminiscent of the edge on a torn piece of paper from a spiral-lined notebook. The packaging design was also inspired by confetti, a curation of optimistic colours, covering us in celebration of one another. The colours were distributed by product category so there would be a mix of colours in the cross-category merchandised fixtures.
