Bergmeyer, the award-winning design collaborative with offices in Boston, Columbus, and Los Angeles, in partnership with the renowned team of strategic and technical experts in material sustainability at the Sustainability Management & Strategy Collaborative (SMSC), announces today the expansion of its powerhouse design offering with the launch of its new retailer-focused sustainability consultancy, Bergmeyer+.
Bergmeyer+ begins at the most fundamental level, helping retailers align their overarching purpose and mission with their store design sustainability goals. Bergmeyer+ benchmarks and evaluates the three big “C’s” – carbon, chemistry (toxicity), and circularity (waste) of current Store Fixture programs for retail brands based on information provided by the client, the client’s fixture vendors, all the way down to the vendors’ raw materials suppliers, providing retailers with recommendations and a roadmap for optimizing climate-positive change that aligns with their corporate sustainability and ESG goals.
The Bergmeyer+ team will work with retail partners to provide a comprehensive sustainability goal rubric for fixtures, a fixture supply chain comparative evaluation, and an overview of benchmarking results that will help lay the groundwork to create a sustainability assessment and implementation roadmap to meet the established corporate sustainability goals.
“I was astonished when we first dug into the retail fixture market and understood the breadth and width of its impacts. Retailers everywhere are looking to make a shift towards sustainability — but they’re often missing this huge piece of the puzzle, said Annie Bevan, CEO & Founder of SMS Collaborative. “That’s what makes this partnership with Bergmeyer so exciting because we have this huge opportunity to come together to support companies seeking a clearer path to meet their toxicity, carbon, and circularity goals in collaboration with their fixture suppliers.”
As shoppers continue to prioritize purpose as a driving factor for their purchasing decisions, the growing emphasis on environment and health means retailers face mounting scrutiny over their impact on ecosystems and climate change. And although industry-led sustainability commitments are widespread, there is limited innovation focused on store fixtures and the in-store environment despite the US Retail Store Fixture Industry reaching an estimated $8.6 billion in revenue in 2023 alone (according to a 2023 report from IBISWorld).
With most of the innovation concentrated on the product level within the retail market, Bergmeyer+ aims to go beyond the retail industry’s standard sustainability practices by focusing not only on product and packaging, but more importantly the very shelves they sit on. While the industry may have many lofty corporate sustainable goals in place, existing practices are falling woefully short of those goals, and typically leave out large components of the store elements like store fixtures, visual merchandising, and marketing tangibles.
“We started Bergmeyer+ for the very simple reason that there seemed to be a gap,” said Bergmeyer Principal Christian Davies. “In terms of agreed standard terms, in terms of go to resources most of all in terms of an overarching industry strategy towards a greener future.”
To learn more about Bergmeyer+ and its offerings visit bergmeyer.com/plus.
