This Cool-Kid Interior Design Studio Is Behind All the Best Retail Spaces Right Now

Would you describe your dental office as chic? What about design-forward, aesthetically inspired or Insta-worthy? A dreamy wellness haven that serves as a beautiful escape from the bustling city streets below? Unless you’re a patient at Sama, a new 3,200-square-foot “integrative oral health wellness studio” in New York City, your answer is likely an emphatic “no.”

With a focus on “ambiance, design and patient experience,” Sama’s natural stone mosaic flooring, sculptural shelving and cream-toned color palette are meant to evoke “a cross section of Parisian apartment meets wellness spa.” It’s the brainchild of founder and dentist Dr. Jaskaren Randhawa and architectural designer Madelynn Ringo, the founder and creative directer behind Brooklyn-based interior design firm Ringo Studio. 

Since its launch in 2020, Ringo Studio has worked alongside some of the buzziest up-and-coming fashion, beauty, wellness and consumer product companies to build out their brand visions in physical spaces, from permanent retail outposts and treatment studios to thoughtful pop-ups. Among the firm’s notable clients, in addition to Sama, are Bala, Google, Modern Age, Fitbit, Our Place, Contact Sports, Sephora and Studs.

Ringo had a creative upbringing, and in many ways design was in her blood, she tells Fashionista: “My mom was an artist, and that kind of set my creative journey pretty early on. I dabbled in things like graphic design, Photoshop, painting, sort of anything visual — it just became my medium for communication,” she recalls. She pursued an architecture undergraduate degree, and then went on to get a masters in architecture at Yale, with a first job working with the Standard Hotel. 

“I shifted from a very classical way of thinking about space into a very contemporary context…almost jumping right into this idea of brand design and brand storytelling with that first experience working for the Standard, which is one of the ultimate icons of brand messaging,” says Ringo.

It was during her time with the Standard Hotel that she truly began to realize the impact interior design and physical spaces could have on creating and bolstering a brand. “Everything about that — down to the scent that they have in the hallways and the character of every detail, the fabric, the color palette, the music — it’s all hyper considered and hyper coordinated. That allowed me to really think about design, not just the table that you’re putting in the space, but the entire story that you’re telling and the entire experience that somebody is having,” she says.

Another pivotal point in her early career came around 2018, when she was tasked with conceptualizing Glossier‘s brick-and-mortar retail stores as the brand was taking off. “Coming from an architectural background and then transitioning into a tech startup, I was exposed to and working directly with people from the community team, from the marketing team, from the product team,” she remembers of her time working in-house for the burgeoning beauty brand. “I was thinking about the interior design of those retail stores through the lens of all of those different categories of the business: What is this customer experience going to be like? What is the social media [opportunity] or what is the image that someone’s going to post to social media that then is going to help tell and extend the brand story? It gave me this much more in-depth approach to interior design, more like brand identity, but through the lens of architecture as the medium.”

After her stint at Glossier, Ringo delved further into the beauty realm, taking an in-house position at Modern Age, another tech company focused on beauty and wellness treatments, with two physical stores in Manhattan. But a desire to go off on her own was already building.

“I was always interested in creating my own design studio,” says Ringo. “Part of that stemmed from wanting to try and push the boundaries of what an architecture studio could offer or what types of services or conversations we could get involved with. When I started Ringo Studio, I was coming at it from the experience of being at these larger companies, thinking about the way that they moved really quickly and… were pushing ideas about marketing.” 

That goal became a reality in 2020, when Ringo Studio opened up shop in Brooklyn. The boutique studio’s approach to interior design is unique not just because of its basis in architecture, but also because of how it works with clients — in ways that transcend the typical role of an interior designer, explains the company’s founder. 

“I like working with clients at a much earlier stage than most designers, especially most interior designers,” she explains. “Even before we get to the design element, we’re trying to think about their business in a different context. For example, what if the dentist could look like a hotel lobby? How would that change a consumer behavior and a consumer experience? [Even though] our end product is often interior design spaces, I really see us more as more of a 360 creative strategy partner, bringing brand narratives and identity to life through physical experiences.”

Ringo’s projects, which incorporate organic and sculptural lines, custom builds (thank you, architecture degree), vivid color palettes and whimsical touches — like palm trees in Studs‘ Miami outpost or a side table that subtly resembles a giant tooth in Sama’s waiting room — are each unique, with meticulous attention to detail.

“We’re not the type of design team where we go away and do a bunch of things and then come back and you get A or B; we really like to have a very collaborative process with everybody on board,” says Ringo. “Often that means we’re putting together a lot of mood boards, which sometimes it sounds like a very simple task… But you don’t learn how to make mood boards in architecture school.”

After creating visual mood boards, the next stage is focusing on customer experience for the clients, who tend to want something non-traditional. For example, when the studio worked to design a Los Angeles store for kitchenware brand Our Place, “we really wanted to think about people,” says Ringo. “The whole concept became about creating a very domestic material palette and a domestically scaled space so that you felt like you were just wandering through your friend’s apartment.” 

Ringo likens this part of the process to set design, with the goal of building a “visual narrative.” “We’re then pulling [that narrative] through every little detail: the material, the lighting, the scale of objects, the way things are merchandised, and then you get to play around,” she explains. “It’s much more playful and theatrical than typical retail shopping.”

Of course, these beautiful spaces lend themselves to social media sharing and word-of-mouth marketing. “We want people to have an emotional reaction to our space. We want them to notice the architecture, notice the colors, and then feel excitement, feel sexy, feel calm from it,” notes Ringo. “They do photograph the spaces and want to share that they’re in these spaces… That’s the foundation of experiential retail design — it’s also a marketing strategy, because then your community feels excited enough to share their experience on the internet with other people, and that builds much more of an authentic customer-to-brand relationship.”

In a time when physical retail spaces are sometimes seen as ineffectual and unnecessary, Ringo is seeking to defy that notion.

“Yes, of course you can buy all of these products online within two seconds on Instagram shop, but what we’re offering customers is a much more immersive experience, almost like a hospitality-type experience,” she says. “I think the internet can be so saturated right now. If you want a more meaningful impression on someone, you have to do something more special for them….These physical spaces can also be such a big conduit for human interaction, which you can’t get in that online experience.”

And in most cases, Ringo Studio’s physical spaces serve as much more than just points of sale: “[They’re] also multifaceted spaces for the brands themselves. So they can host events, they can do photo shoots. It’s almost like we’ve given them a content studio as well as a retail store,” says Ringo.

Ringo Studio is undoubtedly buzzy — working with buzzy brands will have that effect. But the founder is intentionally keeping her business relatively small, even as its ambitions continue to grow. As a boutique firm, the team now comprises seven people, who work on an estimated five or six projects at any given time. “It’s not the type of studio where we sign a client and then I never interface with them again. I’m very involved in every project,” says the founder. 

But it’s taken on larger-scale projects and has big plans for the immediate future, including spearheading construction for Steve Madden’s forthcoming Times Square flagship. “That’s a really interesting project for us because we are working with a brand that has been around for years, and now we have this opportunity to collaborate with them, reinvent their retail experience and evolve their brand identity through that physical space into a new chapter.”

Ringo describes the project as a “milestone” for Ringo Studio, and an opportunity to diversify the company’s portfolio. “A lot of the brands that we work with are often younger, startup D2C brands, and I’m really excited about this shift into working with a much more established brand that comes with a completely different set of opportunities and challenges, like: How do you take a brand that people know and surprise and delight the customers all over again?”

As Ringo Studio’s clientele continues to expand and evolve, so does the team’s knowledge around brand building.

“Every time we work with one of these brands, we get this amazing education in brand identity through their lens. We’ve learned about their products, we learn about how they market to their customers. We just get this incredible deep dive,” she says. In this way, Ringo Studio is much more than just a design and architecture firm: It’s a full strategic and creative partner for up-and-coming (or established) brands looking to carve out their space in the world. 

Never miss the latest fashion industry news. Sign up for the Fashionista daily newsletter.

Source: Fashionista.com