2 October 2026
The word has been used so much that it's now slapped on any place with a plant and a candle. Here's what a concept store really is, the three shops that invented it and what MATERIA at Balborraz 14 will be like.
Every time I say we are opening a concept store at Balborraz 14, someone gives me a look that says they can't tell if it's a shop, a gallery or a café with ambitions. I get it: the word has been used so much that today it's slapped on any place with a plant and a scented candle. So let me tell you what it really is, where it comes from and why it has nothing to do with an ordinary shop.
In short: a concept store is a shop organised around a point of view, not a product category. It mixes fashion, objects, books, art or food because someone has chosen them with the same eye, and a visit feels more like walking through an exhibition than running an errand.
An ordinary shop is defined by what it sells: shoe shop, bookshop, hardware store. A concept store is defined by who chooses. You might find a T-shirt next to a ceramic mug and a photography book, and it isn't a mess: all three pieces tell the same story. The thread isn't the product, it's the judgement.
What it isn't: a shop with lots of choice, a pretty bazaar or a place with good music. Take away the person who selects, and if what's left is just an assortment, it was never a concept store.
Almost everything we call a concept store today comes from three places. I've visited them, studied them, and I go back to them whenever I'm in doubt.
Fashion editor Carla Sozzani opened a gallery in 1990 in a former garage at number 10 Corso Como. The following year she added a bookshop, a fashion and design shop, a café and a garden, and in time even a small hotel. That's how WWD and Forbes tell it, calling it outright the world's first concept store. The idea was simple and radical: a place where fashion lived alongside art and everyday life, like a magazine you could walk through.
In March 1997, Colette Roussaux and her daughter Sarah Andelman opened Colette at 213 rue Saint-Honoré. Three floors with fashion, an exhibition gallery, a bookshop and a water bar with more than a hundred bottled brands. For twenty years it was the place where a trainer, a perfume and a fanzine appeared together before anywhere else. It closed on 20 December 2017, and Andelman explained that they preferred to close rather than sell, because in someone else's hands it wouldn't be the same (as The Fader reported when the closure was announced). That sentence sums up the concept better than any definition: without the eye of whoever chooses, there is no shop.
In 2004, Rei Kawakubo, the designer behind Comme des Garçons, and her husband Adrian Joffe opened Dover Street Market in Mayfair. Kawakubo called it "beautiful chaos": huge brands and unknown designers sharing a floor, each with its own corner, and the space changing every season as if it were an installation. Today it also has stores in Tokyo, New York and Beijing, and it still treats its facade as a canvas.
None of the three looks like the others, but all three follow the same rules. And none of them needs a Milan or Paris budget to work on a street in Zamora:
The traditional shop competes on price and range. There, the internet and the big chains always win. A concept store competes on the only thing that can't be copied: the judgement of whoever runs it and the experience of walking in. That's why it works so well in small cities and on streets with history, where people stroll without hurrying. In the post about Calle Balborraz I told you this was for centuries the street of craftspeople and shops; a concept store is, deep down, a return to that.
MATERIA will be exactly that, on a neighbourhood scale. We open very soon, and inside there will be T-shirts and designer pieces, customised ceramics and porcelain, reworked vintage and one-off pieces by other craftspeople I admire. Next to it, a sewing and alterations workshop, and a studio where I design window displays and handmade props for other small shops.
Each piece will carry its own label with a QR code holding its story and its payment, which is what I call Phygital Craft. And the space won't stand still: it will change with the seasons, the commissions and whatever happens on the street. Slow-cooked, from Zamora to the world.
It's a shop organised around a point of view rather than a type of product. It brings together fashion, objects, books, art or food chosen with the same eye, and it usually changes often so that every visit is different.
It's generally considered to be 10 Corso Como, which Carla Sozzani opened in Milan in 1990 as a gallery and expanded the following year with a bookshop, shop, café and garden. Colette in Paris (1997) and Dover Street Market in London (2004) followed.
Barronico will soon open MATERIA at Calle Balborraz 14 in Zamora: designer pieces, customised ceramics and porcelain, a sewing and alterations workshop, and a window display studio for small shops.
Who's writing
Juan Carlos Barrón
Web designer, event organiser, visual merchandiser, window dresser and retail consultant with 28 years in stores such as Zara, Chanel, Lladró and Galeries Lafayette. Now, from the beautiful Calle Balborraz, at number 14, in Zamora, to the world: in Spanish, English and French.
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