Bold retail concepts that get greenlit
and reach the customer intact.
Satellite is a plug-and-play senior design team, built for Retail VPs handed a store mandate and a deadline.
Your concept survives the committee, the value engineering, and the fabricator’s cost sheet.
- $20B+
- Combined annual revenue of clients
- 15+
- Years in retail and spatial experience
- 500+
- Spaces touched or transformed
Trusted by
How a bold brief
becomes a generic store.
(you’ve seen this before)
-
Request
A mandate. A deadline. A team already at capacity.
“The CEO wants something beautiful. Fast.”
-
Concept
You brief the boldest concept you feasibly can.
Already safer than you’d like.
“Let’s do what worked before.”
-
Development & Approvals
Then it’s whittled down by a hundred decisions, each one de-risking it a little more.
“We’ll simplify it for rollout.”
-
Open
What opens is generic, because generic felt safe.
But generic doesn’t convert.
Generic marks your brand as a follower.
“The fabricator says they can’t make this work.”
-
Review
And your team is cited as the cause.
Bold work converts.
Safe work gets approved.
We make bold work the safe choice.
A committee can’t approve beauty or emotion. There’s no metric for either.
So we build concepts where every design decision is its own business case.
I’ve worked with James across three brands.
He understands how I think, how businesses our size operate, and what we need to show up powerfully; both internally as a team and externally as a global retailer.
Gregg Hurley Senior Director, Global Real Estate Development 
From the people who hired us.
With Satellite, we went from brief to fabrication in under 3 months. When the debut store opened, our CCO called it the best in our 100+ door fleet.
Sandra Restrepo Senior Director, The Shade Store We had a vision to take our store presentation to the next level, but no internal design team. Satellite got our retail concept, our brand and developed the right solution to take our visual communication to a standard that matched the CEO’s ambitions for the brand.
Jeff Fisher Former VP, Retail, Blenders Eyewear We’re obsessive about the design of our products, and Satellite helped us bring that same rigour to our initial physical retail expansion.
Rémi Paringaux Co-founder and Creative Director, Commune 
About the Founder
6 years on the client side.
500+ doors across 18 countries.
You’re getting a partner who has sat in your chair.
James Montgomery is an Industrial Design and Retail Brand Experience consultant, originally from Scotland. He formerly led a design team within the 'Global Retail Design Innovations' department at Lululemon, co-designing highly-publicized projects between 2017 and 2023; helping take the company from $2B to $10B.
James founded Satellite in response to a gap he identified as a corporate client: The need for an agile B2B retail design firm that connects the dots between multi-horizon innovation and actionable, KPI-driven results.
Connect on LinkedInHow it works
01
Call
Book a 30-minute call. Bring the brief, and we’ll tell you what we’d do with it.
02
Create
We get an original concept in front of leadership, fast. Every design decision argued from customer behaviour and brand value, so the bold choice reads as the safe one.
03
Protect
We stay on as the design’s author through value engineering, prototype, first article and install. What was approved is what opens.
04
Win
The store opens on time and intact. Your team takes the credit.
Questions we hear a lot.
We work with your internal team, not around it. They are buried in the day-to-day. Skill gaps take months to hire for. An outside perspective stops a team talking to itself. We are not here to replace anyone.
We do our best work with vertical retail brands. You own the product and the stores, so the space is a brand asset. Apparel, footwear, home and lifestyle. Multi-brand or franchise? Say so on the call for a straight answer.
We design. We don’t build.
We keep a network of trusted fabricators and suggest the ones best for the design intent and site location(s).
Design-build consultants favour their own margins. We put your concept first.
Your team runs the build, while we stay in the loop as the design’s author and defender, present at prototype, first article and install.
A retail concept built from your brand values, plus everything needed to sell it internally. Renderings, animations, customer journey mapping, graphic treatments, material options, vendor introductions.
Whatever gaps need filling.
We move as fast as needed.
On a recent engagement we went from brief to fabrication hand-off in under three months.
We’ve sprinted entire concepts in days to hit last-minute CEO presentations.
And with some clients, we provide on-going design support over years.
Engagements are scoped to the mandate.
Most start with a short strategic sprint, an audit or a direction sprint, so you see the thinking before committing to a full concept.
The intro call is where we work out what fits.
We usually scope one short engagement first. An audit, or a direction sprint. You see how we work before committing to a full concept. You get something usable either way. Nobody benefits from us staying longer than we’re useful.
Ready when you are. Book a 30-minute intro.
Want the cheapest set of drawings?
A design-build one-stop shop?
A vendor who executes without questioning the brief?
We’re not your team.
We work best with brands that treat stores as a brand asset worthy of impact, and with people who want to make an impact in the brands they work for.
A satellite needs two forces to hold orbit. The push outward, and the pull of gravity.
Bold retail concepts are the same. All push is a beautiful deck that never gets built. All pull is a store that looks like everyone else’s. We keep the two in balance.
It also describes how we work. In your orbit, not on your org chart.
Much of our work is under NDA. No brand wants its next format seen before it opens. We stay invisible while your team takes the credit.
On a call we’ll walk you through work which we have permission to show, but not publish.
Got a brief? We’ll tell you what we’d do with it.
Bring us your mandate.
We had a store opening on the calendar and a mandate to bring new ideas to an off-site with senior leadership.
Satellite sprinted through a dozen concepts in just 3 days, working directly with my team so the final presentation reflected how we communicate, internally.
© 2026 Satellite Design Studio