Arc’teryx Brings Sustainable Gear Repair To Jilin City

The apparel industry has come a long way over the years, with ever more fashion houses embracing sustainable initiatives to keep worn garments out of landfills. In-store textile recycling and resale programs have become increasingly prevalent, as outfitters pursue clever ways to reduce environmental impact without cutting into their bottom line. Arc’teryx exemplifies this evolution—a label dedicated to helping consumers connect with nature, and now helping them save it, too.

Based in North Vancouver, Canada, a city abutting mountainous terrain, Arc’teryx manufactures technical clothing tailored to alfresco activities ranging from hiking and climbing to skiing and snowboarding. Leveling up its longstanding sustainability efforts, a few years ago the retailer launched ReBird, a comprehensive program that extends the product lifecycle. ReBird invites patrons to bring in their used merch either to repair for continued wear or donate for store credit. Arc’teryx revives the donated items for resale or, when more appropriate, repurposes them as scraps to fashion into one-of-a-kind creations. These “re-wilded” jackets, shells, and pants are priced significantly less than new products, making the company’s high-performance wares more accessible to a wider range of budgets and effectively expanding its customer base.

How The Arc’teryx ReBird Service Center Embodies The Brand’s Ethos

ReBird, which first appeared as shop-in-shops throughout North America, has steadily expanded and now includes a handful of overseas service centers. Now, the British Columbian brand unveils its first outpost “in the field,” so to speak: a pop-up at a popular ski destination in Jilin City, China. The strategic slopeside location by Shanghai firm Still Young, places sustainability efforts directly in the natural environment that Arc’teryx products are conceived to explore and protect, and broadens brand awareness in a market experiencing surging growth since the country hosted the 2022 Winter Olympics.

Open for ski season only, the pop-up embodies ReBird’s core concepts of repurposing, upcycling, and waste reduction. The 10-sided, steel-framed yurt sits lightly on the land, minimizing environmental impact. The vibrant coloration of its tarpaulin top stands out against the surrounding snow; “skiers can see the tent as they zoom down from the mountaintop,” Still Young founder Eric Ch explains. Brand loyalists slaloming past will recognize the illuminated logo at the tent’s peak: the skeletal fossil of the archaeopteryx, a winged and feathered Jurassic-era dinosaur from which the company derives its name. Both the colorful tarp roof and the service center’s 20-foot-tall sign, in the shape of a supersized jacket, are crafted from an angular patchwork of repurposed Arc’teryx textile scraps, elevating the individual purpose of clothing into a collective one, Ch notes: “Outerwear that originally protected just one person has been transformed into a shelter, carrying greater meaning.”

Amenities Include A VIP Lounge And On-Site Gear Repair

Still Young was an apropos choice for the project, having previously teamed with the client to conceive four Arc’teryx stores throughout China, including the 9,500-square-foot Beijing flagship featured in the February 2024 issue of Interior Design. The studio has built a rep­utation as a retail and rollout specialist, creating shops and cafés that put a regional spin on global conglomerates like McDonald’s and Nike. “Our current focus is the localization of international brands and the modularization of commerce,” Ch says. Here, that meant channeling the natural features of the surrounding Changbai Mountains and Songhua Lake.

Inside the 1,755-square-foot Arc’teryx ReBird Service Center, as it’s officially called, is a VIP lounge and a workshop space offering on-site repair and refresh services. A bank of washing machines invites shoppers to get their gear laundered, while technicians use sewing machines and specialized tools to replace zippers, patch holes, and restore insulation to extend each garment’s lifespan. While waiting, guests can relax and enjoy coffee beverages decorated with custom latte art—the brand logo, a faithful depiction of the tent—rendered by a 3D printer. Sips are served from a central bar-in-the-round partially crafted of molded resin formed to resemble stacked snowflakes or shattered ice—a nod to the winter environment. Completing the cabinesque decor are a campfire-style gas firepit that encourages gathering, and wood grain–print paneling and product displays carved into organic shapes to echo the terrain outside. Windows are veiled by translucent film illustrating a birds-eye view of rippling water, waves radiating outward like the aftermath of a pebble tossed into a pond.

A testament to creative reuse, the project represents a flipped approach to retail: highlighting typically back-of-house operations to create immersive, customer-facing experiences that demonstrate and celebrate eco-friendly values. “It’s a full-service store without any commercial retail purpose,” Ch says. “The aim is to educate outdoor enthusiasts on environmental protection concepts and provide a place for them to rest and relax.” By choosing the location of a working ski resort, Arc’teryx connects its sustainable practices directly with the outside activities its products are designed for, creating a prescient circular narrative that reinforces the retailer’s commitment to protecting the natural world its clientele cherishes.

Walk Through The Arc’teryx ReBird Service Center in Jilin City

Still Young Brings the Outdoors in at Arc’teryx Beijing Flagship

Of all the world’s great cities, Vancouver has one of the closest connections to nature. Surrounded by dense forests, scenic waterways, and snow-capped mountains that offer access to miles of hiking trails and limitless space for wilderness pursuits, the western Canadian seaport is a fitting base for Arc’teryx, a high-performance brand for outdoor apparel and equipment. In contrast, Beijing’s endless urban sprawl might seem an odd location for one of the company’s stores. However, following China’s strict pandemic lockdowns, and spurred by the 2022 Winter Olympics hosted in the capital, the outdoor sports market has grown significantly across the country’s first-tier cities, and demand for suitable attire has kept pace.

More than simply selling clothes to both new fans and veteran enthusiasts of hiking, skiing, and rock climbing, the new Arc’teryx flagship in the trendy Sanlitun neighborhood aims at projecting the plein-air lifestyle of Canada’s Coast Mountains by translating the region’s adventure-driven attitude for Beijingers. “The store interior not only displays outdoor gear but also conveys a connection with nature,” says Eric Ch, founder of Still Young, the Shanghai-based studio assigned the project. Given the context, this decoding required a sizeable amount of imagination and a few reinvented tropes—skills the firm has honed creating a number of much-admired immersive commercial spaces. “To showcase Vancouver’s ambiance to a Chinese audience, we integrated British Columbia’s natural beauty and outdoor culture into the shop’s design, allowing customers to feel its unique essence through visual elements and material choices,” Ch continues, setting the scene.

For an Outdoor Clothing Brand, Nature Serves as Inspiration 

What’s the most recognizable symbol of nature? A tree. To Still Young, this seemed like a good place to start. The studio also wanted the interior to feel rooted (pun intended) in its location, so Ch and his team looked to arboreal interpretations by local artists to find forms that felt appropriate for the teeming metropolis. Working with these artists and a roster of skilled craftspeople, they built a fiber reinforced–plastic sculpture in the shape of an enormous, ancient tree trunk—a gnarled and twisted form that occupies the fully glazed street corner of the 9,500-square-foot, two-story store, engulfing a staircase before disappearing through the ceiling. Clearly visible from the street, the biomorphic structure gives passersby the impression that the emporium was built around a massive tree and not the other way around. This act of botanical reinterpretation, as Ch notes, “became the main source of inspiration, aiming to perfectly blend urban outdoor culture and art with the store environment.”

Biomorphic Forms and Natural Materials Add Visual Interest

Inside, where organic forms and natural-appearing materials proliferate, customers might well think they’re exploring a forest. Clad in glass fiber–reinforced concrete with a wood-effect finish, the walls and ceiling in a ground-floor room dedicated to professional apparel meld into a continuous freeform shell that gives the space the look and feel of a hollow carved into another tree. Similarly sculpted surfaces in the same material feature throughout the interior, defining grottolike fitting rooms or, finished with chalky plaster, creating an events space that resembles a rock cavern eroded by wind and water. Outfitted with sofa seating and state-of-the art audiovisual equipment, it could be a high-tech lounge from the stone age. Artificial-stone outcrops and low bleachers made from piles of what appear to be milled-timber logs are dotted throughout the open areas, creating islands for visual merchandising.

If the store interior embodies these convictions successfully, so too does the facade, which juxtaposes vast expanses of glass with slabs of FRP colored and textured to mimic striated mountain escarpments. But it’s another sculptural installation—a giant pine cone sitting on a platform in the glazed corner window as if it had just dropped from the tree above—that most succinctly captures the project’s multiple intentions and practices. While the 7-foot-tall conifer seed obviously pays homage to nature in a directly mimetic sense, it is also an artisanal object that evokes the realms of art, craft, and sustainability—the last because it’s made entirely of molded pulp from factory waste.

Walk Through the Arc’teryx Beijing Flagship

still young: dawn du; dada zhao; linda li; laura cai; mayi zhang; azel wang; ethan li; cc li; donald lin; ken tao; james xu; abel lu; asha li; douglas xu.

Leaping Creative Designs an Otherworldly Flagship for Inclusive Clothing Brand, Bosie

Home to the former Shanghai French Concession, Huaihai Road has been synonymous with high culture and fashion since the mid 19th century. The wide boulevard with manors off its leafy lanes is one of the world’s premier shopping addresses, home to such luxury brands as Hermès and Louis Vuitton. It’s no coincidence, then, that Bosie, an online fashion retailer aimed at the Gen Z set, selected 627 Huaihai Road for its brick-and-mortar flagship in Shanghai and Leaping Creative to design it.

Bosie is the brainchild of a small group of twentysomethings led by Guangyao Liu. Founded in 2018, it’s a design-driven label imbued with the team’s take on relaxed, genderless apparel available to anyone with an internet connection. Bosie’s online success—the company raked in 1 million yuan, approximately $200K, in revenue the month it launched—precipitated the 2019 opening of its first store in Hangzhou Kerry Centre. Today, it operates 26 shops across China. The Huaihai Road outpost is the fifth by Leaping Creative, following ones in Beijing, Tianjin, Changsha, and Guangzhou.

“Bosie is more than clothing,” Leaping Creative founder and design director Zen Zheng begins. “It provides the younger generations with a means for showing the philosophies they believe in. Unisex fashion is not only a concept that joins the conversation for gender equality but also gives a new self-expression for this demographic.” The rise in the desire for cozycore garments during the pandemic gave Bosie an additional boost.

On its website, Bosie states that “through retro, childlike fun and unique products, we can break boundaries and show the innocence, seriousness, freedom, and romance of adults.” Based on research of the target customer as well as inspiration from the product collections, Leaping Creative developed that retro notion into a project narrative in which Bosie is an intrepid extraterrestrial life form that roams the galaxies and has landed in Shanghai, resulting in
a Jetsons-esque experience containing not only clothing and accessories but also amenities in step with the Gen Z way of life.

The 21,500-square-foot store spans the ground and second floors of a mixed-use building with WeWork as the auspicious anchor tenant. The futuristic journey begins at the entrance, where the facade incorporates reflective stainless-steel sheets above extensive glazing. Flanking the entry door are semicircular glass elevator shafts that Zheng updated with what he calls a “space-age installation”: floor-to-ceiling LCD screens looping Bosie lifestyle videos. “The facade responds to Shanghai’s strict building regulations, which do not allow us to change the architecture. But we were able to cover the original elevator shafts with the screens, which in turn attract passersby into Bosie.”

If the videos don’t draw them in, then the enormous 10-foot-wide sculpture resembling a rocket engine that’s clearly visible through the windows ought to do it. Similarly, on a column, a pilot helmet is jacked into a control board. “We used the engine and helmet to hint at the alien story,” Zheng notes. “The helmet sends a continuous feed back to base.”

That base could very well be found on the ground floor, where a short spiral stair is sheathed in steel panels. The UFOlike form anchors the central set of escalators and divides the floor’s areas. On one side is apparel, including the laboratory-themed Purple collection. Following the space-exploration storyline, garments are displayed on racetrack-shape rails above a nonfunctioning conveyor belt, its aluminum rods powder-coated sage green. The pleasing shade reappears on columns, paneling, and upholstery, particularly on the lunar-looking sofas in the waiting area outside the capsule-shape fitting rooms.

A major Zoomer perk is on the other side of the ground floor: the café. It features an old-school photo booth and a self-serve machine dispensing ice cream, vegan of course. “The ice cream reinforces the sustainability of Bosie’s Blue collection, which is made from eco-friendly, raw materials,” Zheng explains.

The second floor furthers Bosie’s pro-nature, all-inclusive sensibility. A 17-foot-long white fiberglass goose greets customers stepping off the escalators. “It’s the brand mascot,” Zheng says, “and satisfies netizens’ need for Instagram moments.” Beyond, in a corner, is a pet hotel for shoppers to drop off or play with furry friends. “Based on the latest customer research, 40 percent of young people in China have pets,” Zheng says. “We offered a place where they can bring them as well as meet other pet owners. All these extras encourage customers to stay longer.”

As do various interactive installations. AR tech forms the basis for fanciful real-time videos that can be captured by customers. “The store’s facial recognition feature corresponds to Bosie’s Black collection, which is based on sci-fi films,” Zheng says. “By capturing images of passersby, artistic Bosie plants will grow from the face depicted on the screen. The customer can then download the animation clip and share on social.”

The store’s Tomorrowland aesthetic merges disc-shape motifs and curving corners with polished and brushed metals, glowing panels, and gentle sky blues, beiges, and grays for an overall setting that’s inviting and optimistic. The numbers confirm the sentiment. States Zheng: “Daily revenue of the flagship broke the record for previous Bosie stores.”

Leaping Creative: chang chen; xiaowen chen; qiongwei zhou; shengyue xia; mindong zeng; minghao liang; zijun luo; zhuji li; jiarong feng; zheming ji; jiayi huang; jiachun wu; liwei chen; tianwei luo; dongzhi you; zixin huang; yanjun he; boquan yu

Seenvision: interactive installation consultant