Delivering a piercing concept: Shopfitting an Australian brand’s Westfield 277 Auckland store

With over 80 stores nationwide, the SkinKandy retail experience is well-known in Australia. The piercing and accessories retailer combines a striking, glossy pink and black fitout with an extensive range of piercing options, and a team of piercing professionals on site to make customers’ ‘piercing dreams a reality’. 

After a successful expansion in Australia, it was a logical progression for the team to establish a New Zealand footprint in Auckland’s famous 277 Broadway mall. Dimension Shopfitters was selected to bring the piercing concept store to life, due to their extensive experience in delivering turn-key commercial fitout solutions.

“The brief for the store was to simply bring their bold functional design to market and position the SkinKandy brand in front of the target market,” shares Dimension Shopfitters general manager Simon Dickson. “With bold colours, a striking shopfront and signage it is an attractor to customers in a mall setting.”

Utilising a shopfitter with a ‘one stop shop’ business model offers a competitive advantage for SkinKandy, as the process is entirely taken care of by Dimension Shopfitters’ in-house project manager, from quantity surveying, logistics, managing third-party contractors and the installation of joinery through to completion.

Delivering a unique customer experience 

An important part of SkinKandy’s brief is having the on-site capability to carry out piercings for the customer, as well as a retail experience offering jewellery and accessories.  

“It is a truly full-service model in a clever compact retail space,” shares Simon. “Private consult rooms are in each store and the staff are fully trained in advising what jewellery works best for the customer.” 

To deliver this unique store format, Dimension Shopfitters took care of the entire process, from  full shop build and installing a new shopfront, to exterior works, flooring, walls, ceiling, painting, lighting, HVAC and the full fitout of the back of house area including the piercing consult rooms.

Dimension Shopfitters’ warehouse in Albany received retail fixtures from offshore suppliers (which was a key part of managing the logistics for this fitout) which were then delivered to site at key points throughout the four-week fitout period. 

The challenges of a tight turnaround

All retail sites have their challenges, but a four-week turnaround in a mall space with noise constraints and specific hours designated to loud activities (such as welding, cutting or other “hot works”) means the building programme had to be expertly managed.

Bespoke work on the SkinKandy storefront presented another key challenge.

“This store had a wide open shopfront that required precise engineering of framework and structure to receive new entry doors along with the installation of client supplied joinery for the main retail display area,” shares Simon. “This tested our building skills of walls and dimensions to ensure an exact fit of those units—if you’re out by only a few millimetres it can cause huge delays.”

Fortunately, Dimension Shopfitters’ team is highly experienced in custom designs completed to the highest spec: the project was delivered on time and on budget for the client.

“Our clients have so many other things going on whilst a store is being built such as training staff, organising a launch campaign, stock arriving, mall and lease requirements and meeting their own internal targets for launch and sales to customers,” Simon adds. “If we can make the store build easy and painless for them we are on the right path to more success and we get an opportunity to build further stores for that client.”

The client’s response has been overwhelmingly positive, and Dimension Shopfitters has already been commissioned to complete two more SkinKandy stores in New Zealand.

Explore more commercial project fitouts delivered by Dimension Shopfitters