On Builds Its First Brazilian Stores Out of São Paulo's Own Concrete.
- Shop Drop Daily
- 4 hours ago
- 3 min read
On Store Openings, JK Iguatemi & Morumbi Shopping - Pictures courtesy of On / R4DESIGN |
Morumbi Shopping
A brand entering a new country usually imports its identity wholesale. On's first two Brazilian stores do something more deliberate, borrowing the actual architectural language of São Paulo itself, brutalist concrete, modernist movement, a city's own built history, and using it to say something about a Swiss sportswear brand that no imported design ever could.
The references are specific enough to matter. The JK Iguatemi location draws directly from SESC Pompeia, channelling its stone brutalist textures and the sense of movement built into that landmark's own walkways and bridges, with touches of red pulled from the city's most recognisable modernist buildings. Across town, the MorumbiShopping store looks to Oscar Niemeyer's Copan Building instead, translating architecture in motion into retail space through flow, rhythm, and a spatial continuity designed to feel intuitive rather than compartmentalised, unlike the more structured walkway logic of its sibling store.
That distinction between the two locations is worth pausing on. On isn't stamping a single template across both addresses, it's letting each store respond to a different piece of São Paulo's own architectural memory, which means the brand's Swiss design DNA, exposed concrete, natural wood, considered metal finishes, precise scenographic lighting, arrives filtered through local reference rather than laid on top of it untouched. That's a genuinely harder creative brief than a standard retail rollout, but it produces something a generic store never could: two spaces that feel unmistakably On and unmistakably São Paulo at the same time, rather than one identity compromising the other.
