New Balance Design Programme

New Balance required its global store concept executed across sixteen countries, spanning Asia, Europe and North America. The sites vary enormously, from mall tenancies and high-street units to a standalone building in Harajuku, a store inside Anfield stadium and partner retail within Sport Chek, and each carries its own geometry, its own construction market and its own local relationship with the brand.

New Balance is a global name with deeply local attachments, strongest in the cities that shaped it, so an estate reduced to a single repeated template would forfeit the brand’s most valuable asset. The challenge was to hold one recognisable concept across sixteen markets without it becoming a rigid template, in a programme where each store would be built by local teams rather than a single contractor, so whatever was drawn had to be executable by people the studio would never meet.

Greater Group approached each location as an adaptation of a shared retail language rather than a repetition of a fixed template. Space planning, design development and 3D visualisation allowed the concept to respond to each tenancy and market, while preserving the core principles that connect the global network.

Where a location demanded more, the system allowed for greater expression, from Harajuku’s standalone building and integrated café to the unique conditions of Anfield and major global flagships such as Shanghai.

The consistency comes through what sits behind each design. Detailed technical documentation and visual merchandising planograms provide local teams with a clear framework for execution, allowing stores to be delivered across different construction markets without compromising the global standaruku to be a building with a café in it and Anfield to be a store inside a football ground.

The programme demonstrates that a global retail concept can be held consistent across sixteen markets through documentation rather than supervision, with more than fifteen flagships among the projects delivered across Tokyo, Shanghai, Seoul, Boston, London, Berlin, Milan, Barcelona, San Francisco, Ginza, Beijing, Taiwan and Porto, alongside partner retail and the Liverpool FC store at Anfield.

For a brand whose value sits in its local attachments, that is the correct result rather than a compromise. The estate reads as one brand and no two stores read as the same store, and the planogram and documentation model proven here is what allows New Balance to keep opening in new markets without the concept degrading each time it travels.