At Westfield Derby, Design Clarity’s Retail Design Management team acted as the bridge between landlord expectations and retailer ambitions. Our role focused on guiding incoming brands through the centre’s design standards, ensuring smooth approvals, operational feasibility and a consistent, high-quality visual environment across the mall.
This view of Westfield Derby captures the type of environment where effective Retail Design Management becomes essential. As one of the region’s dominant shopping destinations—with multiple anchor tenants, two trading levels and a constant flow of refurbishments and new openings—the centre requires a meticulous and proactive approach to tenant coordination. Design Clarity provided full RDM support, reviewing every retailer submission from concept through to technical documentation, ensuring each proposal aligned with the landlord’s design criteria, safety obligations and long-term strategic vision for the asset.
In practice, this meant advising tenants on permissible shopfront treatments, lighting approaches, signage hierarchy and accessibility considerations well before drawings reached the final approval stage. The goal was not to impose a design style, but to maintain coherence, protect sightlines, and safeguard the customer experience throughout the mall. From independent operators to global brands, each tenant benefitted from clear guidance, prompt feedback and collaborative problem-solving—particularly valuable in a centre with high footfall and tightly scheduled build programmes.
The image highlights the complexity of managing a space where visual connectivity, circulation routes and operational interfaces all intersect. Design Clarity’s RDM oversight ensured that new retail fit-outs complemented the centre’s architectural rhythm, avoided conflicts with shared infrastructure, and delivered consistent quality. The result is an environment where retailers can thrive and the centre’s character remains cohesive, future-proofed and commercially strong.
