Design Museum Transforms Gift Shop Into Grocery Store

Many of us are eager to return to enjoying art outside our homes, live and in-person now that the COVID clouds are starting to part. For the London Design Museum, the return to IRL art exhibitions is close but not soon enough, and they recently converted their store into a grocery market, giving art fans a taste of normalcy a little early while also commenting on all the design that surrounds us.

The SUPERMARKET installation, which offers legitimate pantry staples such as cans of beans, baked bread, fresh produce, and home goods, is a fun pop-art immersive shopping experience. SUPERMARKET’s unique, bright, and colorful visual style is the vision of designer Camille Walala with support from gin brand Bombay Sapphire. To design the labels and packaging for products, the selected emerging artists Amy Worrall, Charlotte Edey, Holly Warburton, Isadora Lima, Jess Warby, Joey Yu, Katherine Plumb, Kentaro Okawara, and Michaela Yearwood-Dan, with a specially designed Bombay Sapphire bottle by Ruff Mercy.

Many of the creatives that bring us a bit of flare and flourish to our lives, including the grocery store, were impacted financially by COVID, and that's why the proceeds from the SUPERMARKET installation are going towards Design Museum’s Emerging Designer Access Fund.

SUPERMARKET is also a reminder that design can be found all around us, including the supermarket. We could live in a cold, pragmatic world where items get generically labeled with no flourish or creativity, and what fun would that be? A lesson given greater weight due to the pandemic, Design Museum demonstrates that creativity is essential for all of us, even when it comes to packaged goods.

Design Museum’s market transformation proved to be a success, and while they sold out of groceries, the museum promises prints of some of the items that will be available for those that missed out on the installation.