Every month, a lot of cool sh*t rolls off our production floor and out the door. This is where we show it off: one project we can’t stop talking about, then a gallery of everything else that made the month. First up, September.
125 Years of Stories, One Floor at a Time
Ride the escalators at Nordstrom’s flagship this fall and the store tells you its own story on the way up. A century of shoes floating in a wall of circular cases. Life-size fashion illustrations standing watch over lift-and-reveal panels. Dimensional letters spelling out 125, each one hiding a customer’s moment — Big Day, Healed, Persistence — behind a little door. And a wall tracing Nordstrom’s place in the culture, from the Anniversary Sale to celeb collabs.
The exhibit pulls from Nordstrom’s archives to celebrate 125 years, created in partnership with MOHAI and Curious Beast. It’s a big, warm, very Seattle story — and it took a lot of good partners to tell it.
Nordstrom, MOHAI, and Curious Beast shaped the story. Then it had to get built. Arts Tech Group fabricated the exhibit: the cases, the plinths, the letterforms, the lift panels. We produced every printed element that went onto them, from the oversized story panels and illustrated figures down to the caption card beside each shoe.
When fabrication and print come from different shops, the seams show — unless both teams treat the other’s work like their own. Color had to hold from the first floor to the fourth. Every panel had to land exactly on the build it was made for. That’s the kind of collaboration we love: every partner holding the same standard, and a finished exhibit where you can’t tell where one team’s work ends and the next begins.
Graphics printed by SuperGraphics; exhibit fabricated by Arts Tech Group. Exhibit content from The Nordstrom Archive, created to celebrate 125 years in partnership with MOHAI and Curious Beast.
More Cool Sh*t From September:
Got Something That Belongs in Next Month's Spotlight?
Big build, tight timeline, or an idea nobody else will touch — bring it. No designs? No problem. We’ll figure out how to make it, then we’ll figure out how to make it fast.
