Levi’s Stores Spain 2002-2008

In retail project management, stores owned and operated by franchise partners can be the most complex to execute. Imposed by the brand’s Brussels HQ to the Spanish partner as local architects and project managers, GOTADIS had to deal with sometimes conflictive interests from both parties: Brand would privilege compliance to guidelines and quality, whilst partners would put priority on costs savings and rapidity of construction.

Fluid communication from GOTADIS both in English and Spanish, as well as attention to detail in the specifications, avoided conflicts and all stores were opened in time and within budget.

GOTADIS had launched a Spanish ArchiCAD user forum, which at that time was strong of more than a thousand members from all parts of Spain and South American countries. Faced with the new challenge of selecting MEP consultants and contractors in different regions of the country, the forum proved to be very useful to collect recommendations from local architects in every city: As a result all twenty-two high street and shopping mall stores opened during that period were built exclusively by local contractors, reducing costs, optimising timelines and ensuring immediate reaction of contractors in case of unforeseen situations on the construction sites.

In the early 21st century mail was still considered unreliable and unsafe, so all exchanged messages needed to be printed for the archives, and most communication still needed to be backed up by fax. Fax was also in fact the only means of communication accepted by El Corte Inglés to manage brand construction works.

ECI is a particular environment and the shop-in-shop implementations proved specially challenging. As the department store could not close to the public except on Sundays, all works on areas of up to eighty square meters needed to be executed when the store was empty: From 11pm on Saturday night until 8am on Monday morning.

Levi’s fixtures at that time were not self-standing so the existing sales area drywalls needed to be unassembled at first to install timber reinforcements between the studs, then panelled again on the first night. New paint would then be applied in at least three layers during the next day, leaving only Sunday night to install flexible flooring and furniture. If anything went wrong there was no time to correct, as handover to ECI would happen in the next morning.