Find out about all the possibilities for your brand
Leave your contact and we will contact you within one business day
By clicking on button, you agree to our Terms and Conditions and our Privacy Policy
Beyond the Pinterest: What Actually Inspires Our Creative Team
Every studio has a moodboard, most of them look the same.
Open Pinterest, Instagram, or any moodboard tool, and you'll find the same handful of images circulating everywhere. Every studio pulls from the same well. Brands start to blur together, and a client's identity gets lost in a sea of near-identical grids and gradients. Ask ten designers for a reference right now, and at least six will pull up something they saw scrolling that same morning.
We built our process to avoid exactly that. When we provide professional branding and retail merchandising services for companies ranging from early-stage startups to big retail chains, we can't afford to think in the same references as everyone else. So our team treats inspiration as infrastructure – something built and maintained, not something that shows up after enough scrolling.
Here's how our art director Aliaksandra and the wider team actually build that infrastructure.
We built our process to avoid exactly that. When we provide professional branding and retail merchandising services for companies ranging from early-stage startups to big retail chains, we can't afford to think in the same references as everyone else. So our team treats inspiration as infrastructure – something built and maintained, not something that shows up after enough scrolling.
Here's how our art director Aliaksandra and the wider team actually build that infrastructure.
Contents
——————————Shared knowledge
——————————Artbooks
——————————Outside the industry
——————————The reference base
Our current design team includes:
At NZR Retail & Branding Agency, grades are more than job titles. They represent a designer's level of ownership, responsibility, and contribution to the team.
The reference base
Our reference base holds more than pretty pictures. The team saves unconventional project decisions from Behance, keeps a dedicated Trello board tagged by web design, graphic design, and retail, and follows a long list of design publications on LinkedIn rather than Instagram, since those accounts run case studies and news with less noise around them.
We also track the market directly: new mall openings, international rebranding projects, new flagship store designs. Someone on the team is usually watching what a competitor's flagship looked like on opening day, or how a retailer handled a rebrand across a hundred locations at once. And there's an internal training archive – when someone comes back from a conference or workshop, they bring materials for the rest of the team, and the studio also pays for select outside courses that anyone can access.
We study winners of major global design awards, too, and dig past the grand prix picks to the specialist agencies behind them. That's how we found Baillat Studio – a small agency whose work is worth studying on its own. Following the shortlists this way, rather than just the headline winners, tends to surface smaller studios doing sharper work than the names everyone already knows.
We also track the market directly: new mall openings, international rebranding projects, new flagship store designs. Someone on the team is usually watching what a competitor's flagship looked like on opening day, or how a retailer handled a rebrand across a hundred locations at once. And there's an internal training archive – when someone comes back from a conference or workshop, they bring materials for the rest of the team, and the studio also pays for select outside courses that anyone can access.
We study winners of major global design awards, too, and dig past the grand prix picks to the specialist agencies behind them. That's how we found Baillat Studio – a small agency whose work is worth studying on its own. Following the shortlists this way, rather than just the headline winners, tends to surface smaller studios doing sharper work than the names everyone already knows.
Outside the industry
Klarna comes up often, specifically for its brand color combinations. Past that, our art director looks outside design almost entirely: 1920s German expressionist films, anime, science lectures.
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari still holds up a century later – the sets, the shadows, the exaggerated angles, all built with almost no budget and a lot of paint on canvas. Akira is a recent rediscovery, worth revisiting for its animation and its color work, and for how much of a neo-Tokyo it manages to build with hand-drawn frames. None of it is retail design, but all of it shapes how the team thinks about space, contrast, and mood when a project calls for it.
Science lectures and podcasts on physics, math, and biology do something for the imagination that design content doesn't – they're a reminder that structure and constraint produce their own kind of beauty. Separately, there's a playlist of Yuri Lotman lectures on YouTube, which runs more as background noise than active study, something to have on while sketching rather than a source to take notes from.
Day to day, more time goes into Pinterest and LinkedIn than Instagram.
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari still holds up a century later – the sets, the shadows, the exaggerated angles, all built with almost no budget and a lot of paint on canvas. Akira is a recent rediscovery, worth revisiting for its animation and its color work, and for how much of a neo-Tokyo it manages to build with hand-drawn frames. None of it is retail design, but all of it shapes how the team thinks about space, contrast, and mood when a project calls for it.
Science lectures and podcasts on physics, math, and biology do something for the imagination that design content doesn't – they're a reminder that structure and constraint produce their own kind of beauty. Separately, there's a playlist of Yuri Lotman lectures on YouTube, which runs more as background noise than active study, something to have on while sketching rather than a source to take notes from.
Day to day, more time goes into Pinterest and LinkedIn than Instagram.
Artbooks
Artbooks are collected here, not browsed once and forgotten. The most recent addition is the Arcane artbook, with the Depeche Mode artbook already ordered. Fashion lookbooks belong in the same category – the Maison Margiela lookbook featured on Commarts is one example, chosen for how deliberately it stages a mood rather than just showing garments.
The Arcane book walks through the show's production from start to finish: early concept work, first sketches, rough 3D models, final renders, and a large volume of character, location, and object designs. It's a record of process – the kind of thing that shows how many wrong turns sit behind a single finished frame.
The Depeche Mode book covers the band's full discography, previously unseen photographs, information booklets, concert tickets and posters, promotional material, and interviews about the band's creative history. It's less a music book than a document of how one visual identity held together across four decades of album covers, tours, and merchandise.
That level of documentation is close to what we aim for in corporate design & branding – a full, consistent world across every touchpoint, built out in that kind of detail.
The Arcane book walks through the show's production from start to finish: early concept work, first sketches, rough 3D models, final renders, and a large volume of character, location, and object designs. It's a record of process – the kind of thing that shows how many wrong turns sit behind a single finished frame.
The Depeche Mode book covers the band's full discography, previously unseen photographs, information booklets, concert tickets and posters, promotional material, and interviews about the band's creative history. It's less a music book than a document of how one visual identity held together across four decades of album covers, tours, and merchandise.
That level of documentation is close to what we aim for in corporate design & branding – a full, consistent world across every touchpoint, built out in that kind of detail.
Shared knowledge
None of this stays with one person. When someone comes back from a conference with new material, it goes into a shared archive the rest of the studio can draw on. Paid courses get added the same way, along with notes and screenshots from whatever anyone happened to find that week.
That's the real advantage of working with our retail design agency: a client isn't hiring one designer's taste. They're getting a reference base built by a whole team over years, checked against real market movement rather than a single Pinterest board.
Whether the work is a brand or a retail merchandising strategy, the starting point is the same – look further than everyone else is looking, and build from there.
If any of this sounds like the kind of thinking your project needs, get in touch. In short, we handle brand identity from the ground up, retail merchandising strategy, corporate design & branding systems, and full retail space design – all built on the same reference base described above, not a template pulled from someone else's moodboard.
That's the real advantage of working with our retail design agency: a client isn't hiring one designer's taste. They're getting a reference base built by a whole team over years, checked against real market movement rather than a single Pinterest board.
Whether the work is a brand or a retail merchandising strategy, the starting point is the same – look further than everyone else is looking, and build from there.
If any of this sounds like the kind of thinking your project needs, get in touch. In short, we handle brand identity from the ground up, retail merchandising strategy, corporate design & branding systems, and full retail space design – all built on the same reference base described above, not a template pulled from someone else's moodboard.