A beautiful and thoughtfully designed showroom is inspiring and creates a tactile environment for shoppers. As a key component in the storytelling of a brand and highlighting its newest offerings, the showroom design is vital. If designed well, a passerby is more inclined to walk in and eventually make a purchase after feeling, seeing and experiencing the product first hand.
Katie Michael-Battaglia, design director at Nemo Tile, understands the process of creating a showroom that speaks to the target audience, displays product properly and drives potential buyers and designers inside. Since joining the 95-year-old tile and stone distributor in 2015, Katie has renovated Nemo’s original Manhattan showroom while designing new ones—Nemo will be entering the New Jersey market with a new locale in Monmouth County, which opens in early 2017. She has also redesigned the Philadelphia showroom, which is housed on the second floor of a building that lacks curb appeal, but still draws ample foot traffic. Not to mention, Michael-Battaglia is a former designer at Gensler as well as a past president of IIDA NY. We connected with her to discuss some of her key strategies to designing a winning showroom.