About the Client: As T&T Supermarket's success was growing steadily, its CEO, Tina Lee, and its majority shareholder, Loblaw Companies Limited, entrusted Watt Retail Agency to design a more premium experience before expanding across Canada and the US. Watt* hired me to create on-brand illustrations for the new shop in Fairview Mall due to my prior experience creating illustrations and branding for retail stores and malls in China.
I was tasked with capturing the rich cultural traditions into a modern visual representation. I offered to create a wallpaper full of hidden Easter eggs for insiders looking up close. The line drawing depicts familiar cityscapes with culinary and shopping references written on signages in Chinese.
The illustrations I created became an essential part of the identity of the new in-store brand experience. The initial design for the interior architecture has gone through multiple transformations, yet the illustrations have remained as proposed and have been carried over every single new (and renovated) store so far †.
*Project Team: Brian Bettencourt and Bryan Morris, respectively Interior Design Director and Brand Creative Director at Watt Retail Agency.
† Non-exhaustive list: T&T Supermarket Fairview Mall (Toronto, ON) | T&T Supermarket College St. and Spadina Ave. (Toronto, ON) | T&T Supermarket Waterloo (ON) | T&T Supermarket Kanata (ON) | T&T Supermarket Montreal (QC) | T&T Supermarket Sage Hill (Calgary, AB) | T&T Supermarket Willowbrook Shopping Centre (Langley, BC) | T&T Supermarket Lansdowne Centre (Richmond, BC) | T&T Supermarket Lougheed (Coquitlam, BC)