Your brand values are unique, but your stores look like everyone else’s.
Your team knows exactly what makes the brand different, but it never reaches the shop floor.
We design stores that ‘wow’ the CEO, convert on opening day, and survive the rollout.
A plug-and-play senior design team for VPs and directors at vertical retail brands. We design the concept, and the process that gets it through the corporate milestones.
Handed a request and a date for a new retail concept?
Book a 30-minute intro →
Free · 30 minutes · No deck required
Prefer email? Hello@SatelliteDesign.Studio
We understand the problems you face.
It was designed for opening day, not year two.
The flagship looks incredible. Then the rollout strips the idea back until a few fixtures carry all the brand value.
You’re managing up, not managing the project.
The CEO wants beautiful images before there’s even a brief, and “I’ll know it when I see it” turns every gate into a guessing game. Committees, silos and Game-of-Thrones politics slow you down and degrade the concept.
The last people you hired burned you.
Design-build fabricators designing around their machines. Consultants blind to how things actually work inside the building. Lots of verbal fluff. They delivered the sexy renders, the leaders loved the presentation, and then they disappeared.
Sound familiar?
We’ve sat on both sides of the table.
Most retail-design help falls into two camps:
- The agency. Delivers a beautiful render, then vanishes before anything gets built.
- The design-build vendor. Bends your concept toward what their own shop can fabricate.
We’re neither. Our founder spent six years commissioning and leading design as the corporate client.
In-house knowledge meets external agility.
Brands our team has designed for
What our clients say.
“[TESTIMONIAL: they read the politics as well as the plan. Our leadership signed off first pass.]”
“[TESTIMONIAL: the concept survived the rollout intact, which has never happened here before.]”
“[TESTIMONIAL: felt like hiring three senior designers on Monday morning.]”
Case study · anonymised
[A vertical apparel brand needed a new concept in nine weeks, and a rollout it could actually repeat.]
[+31%]Conversion, opening quarter
[9 wks]Brief to fabrication hand-off
[24]Doors rolled out to date
About the founder
6 years on the client side. 500+ doors across 18 countries.
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-publicised projects between 2017 and 2023.
He founded Satellite after watching the same gap open from the inside, every time: great renders, no path through the building.
How it works, simplified:
01
Book a strategy call
We look at your current situation and identify the biggest opportunities and quick wins.
02
We orbit your internal team
Supercharging their existing knowledge and skillset, we deliver your full concept and end-to-end strategy.
03
Your team becomes in-house rockstars
Your concepts make design blogs, your customer gets engaged, and the stores convert.
“[PROCESS_TESTIMONIAL: it felt like our team suddenly had a senior studio sitting inside it.]”
[Name] · [Title, Company]
Questions we hear a lot.
We work WITH your internal talent to give your project the perfect mix of external agility, best-in-class skills and in-house knowledge. Your internal team is working the day-to-day and caught up in immediate needs; gaps in skillsets take time to interview for and fill, and sometimes an outside perspective is exactly what’s needed to stop a team talking to themselves. We pride ourselves on bringing fun and energy to internal teams: empowered, not policed, replaced or ignored.
We focus on design and leverage our network of trusted fabricators to make sure fabrication is handed to the team best suited to your needs. That’s the best way to dovetail design intent with outcome while navigating geographic and budgetary parameters.
When we worked in-house, we watched design-build consultants push design language that favoured their fabrication margins and machine capabilities. The way your brand shows up in the market should NOT be defined by the labour and machines of a fabricator. Don’t let the tail wag the dog. We’ll connect you with the teams that will build the concept right.
An incredible retail concept that dovetails your brand values with industrial design innovation, plus everything required to communicate it clearly to your leaders and map the process of getting it in front of your customers. Renderings, animations, customer journey mapping, graphic treatments, material options, vendor introductions. Whatever gaps need filled.
We can move as quick as needed, and support as long as desired. We’ve sprinted entire concepts in days, and we’ve supported clients across years of ongoing design work.
“[TESTIMONIAL, pending approval: Satellite supported our internal team and got us from brief to fabrication hand-off in 3 months. The first store became our highest performing in the fleet and has set the roadmap for the coming years of rollout.]” Senior Director, [COMPANY]
Set against a multi-million-dollar rollout, design is the part that decides whether the rest of it works. Insurance, not a line item. We scope each engagement to the mandate; the intro call is where we work out what fits.
If you’re looking for the cheapest set of drawings, a design-build one-stop shop, or a vendor who executes without questioning the brief, we’re not your team. We do our best work with brands that treat stores as a brand asset, and with teams that want a partner inside the process, not a supplier at the door.
Our work sits under NDA with brands you’d recognise. On a call we’ll walk you through anonymised case studies, covering the before-states, the process, and the results, in as much detail as you need.
Handed a goal and a date? Let’s make sure your team wins.
Book a free 30-minute intro call. We take on a limited number of concept engagements per quarter.
We listen. You talk us through the mandate, the date, and the politics.
We map quick wins. You leave with something you can use, fit or no fit.
You get a straight read. If we’re not right for this, we’ll say so and point you at who is.
Put a date on the calendar →
Free · 30 minutes · No deck required
Designs in 500+ doors across 18 countries.