The Brigada company is a team of architects, designers and marketing experts who transform business and sales spaces. Architect Damjan Geber, the co-owner and head of the company, launched the business with the idea of constructing spaces, but also deconstructing the traditional rules of the profession he learned about in school. Thanks to his “millennial” views of business operations and management, Brigada has firmly taken a key position in the market.
Below we share parts of an interview which came out in the spring issue of Lider Trend magazine:
Damjan points out that “architects need to understand people, discover what they need, and then tailor a place made to measure based on those discoveries”. He claims that the job of an architect should not just be what is taught at college, and he believes that architects do not build, but rather create spaces, ambients, feelings and experiences. He came to that realization when he was given the opportunity to travel to Japan for two months, where he was part of a team of “Architects without borders”.
Damjan Geber made his professional start designing business spaces with a project for the company Lush. Today, after eight years in business, Brigada has over two hundred projects under their belt. He sees a problem in Croatia having few retail brands, very few of which put much thought into their business concept. “Most of them think about how to position a product, put up some posters, print some flyers or arrange their shelves, which is wrong, because the customer has to experience and feel something. For example, when we get back from staying in a hotel, we don’t remember the lamps or the shelves, we remember the experience, what we felt in that space, and creating an experience demands various analyses, from psychological and behavioural ones to functional analyses”, tells us Damjan.
Research shows that in the first six months after a project is completed, sales numbers in those spaces increase by 10 to 15 percent, because Brigada is not about decorating spaces, but rather rearranging business.
“An architect can do spatial analysis, design, or product-design, that is to say, everyone does everything and everyone can get the chance to expand their area of interest, be that through experience or through education. At Brigada, every Friday we all gather and expand our knowledge. Those are things which look like they have nothing to do with work, but actually have very much to do with it. For example, a cooking class is pure creativity, while a self-defence class teaches us the feeling of safety”, says Geber, who sees Brigada as a platform which offers the best of people the opportunity to create products they were trained to create, but also do things which they are interested in.
WPP Group doesn’t have any other company in its portfolio which works with spaces the way Brigada does, and the IIDA Global Excellence Award which we won in Paris for the best-designed exhibition space, for the Croatia osiguranje exhibition “Croatia is Hrvatska”, will also help push us forward.
