Annotations cc: Voo Store

Voo Store has occupied a courtyard on Oranienstraße, Kreuzberg: discreetly set within three hundred square metres of a former locksmith’s workshop, with an eclectic and exacting curation across fashion and design. In August, the store closed its online shop, leaving a postcard where the checkout had been: see you at the store. Under Ozan Akcay, its managing director, and Isabel Barletta, who leads marketing, a smaller team now works from the shop floor, with a curatorial turn towards the independent and the local. Against that shift, we spoke about growth as an industry reflex, and reciprocity practised as an operational condition.

Anoe: The industry has organised itself around the assumption that growth is evidence of health, and an online presence the measure of relevance. The decision to step offline withdraws from this, and carries with it a light critique of the moment. What led you there?

Ozan: There was a boom in e-commerce, and the company grew with it from 2021 onwards. When I joined, we were around ten or twelve people; by 2024, we had grown to around thirty. But by the time I left, it was already clear that e-commerce was slowing down. The growth effect simply wasn’t there anymore.

That was the year the industry should have become sustainable about its financials and its buying, and it was more or less my parting message to the owners. It is easier to say when you are small and independent. A large retailer backed by a corporation cannot announce that it is not going to grow this year — the option does not exist.

And that is the part I find perverse. If growth is evidently not possible, why keep pushing for it? At that point you are lying to yourself. To grow on paper you buy more; the demand is not there, so you discount, and then you are sitting on stock and the financial problem follows. Nobody acts until it bursts, and the decision is to let 30% of the company go — though it was predictable a year or two earlier.

Meanwhile you watch the collapses of the past years, Harvey Nichols, Net-a-Porter, while the ones still standing push for more units. Once your instinct tells you something is wrong, you want to run in the opposite direction. Whatever they are doing, we will do the other thing.

When I came back and looked at the numbers, it was clear that e-commerce was not working as it had. We were losing money on it, because it is an enormous operation. We could have cut costs and held it at break-even, but that would have said nothing. Until COVID there was a playbook: do this and this, and you grow by that much. Since then everything — politically, financially, socially — has become so uncertain that none of the playbooks written before make sense to me. So it is about doing what feels right in the small space we have.

We have a good location, the traffic is there, the community is here. If you spend your time keeping an online operation afloat, you cannot give the store the attention it deserves. Now we are in it every day, with the people who walk in.

Isabel: It’s been a very positive shift to put all our energy into the store. We’ve already seen that it’s been working over the past few months. Moving forward, we want to be much more deliberate about who we collaborate with and what we do with the store. We also want to do more in-store events and, more generally, build on the community around it.

That also changes how we think about marketing. If the store is the focus, it becomes less about reaching as many people as possible and more about giving people a reason to come back. For now, we’ve kept the website and continue to show what is arriving in the store, but the way we communicate with customers has become more direct.

In terms of curation, we want to bring the focus back to Berlin, but also make more room for independent designers and smaller brands.

A: The store already has a strong presence in Berlin, through its location and the community around it. Did that sense of place play a role in affirming this shift?

O: Berlin is a creative and eccentric city, and that shows in the people who come through the door. We knew we had good traffic, but we also knew we were not fulfilling the potential of the store, because the resources were going into keeping the online business afloat, and that is the bigger operation to manage.

Even in the first quarter of this year, while the online shop was still running, we stopped putting focus there. We concentrated on the store: finding a very good store manager, making sure the team is trained. Visual merchandising especially, because the first thing we want to create is an element of surprise. Normally a store changes its merchandising once a season. We now change it every week. A lot of this is driven by curiosity, and I think that curiosity is beginning to shape the world we want to create going forward.

A: Working across disciplines has become a tendency; perhaps a necessity. Practices increasingly meet through shared contexts, sensibilities and ways of shaping experience. Voo Space, adjacent to Voo Store, has been there for some time. How has it evolved?

O: It is in the same courtyard, so it is a natural extension of the store. Until now it has mostly been rented out to brands for pop-ups and installations, and we will continue with that, because it is a good resource for us. But the strategy has changed. We want to bring in artists as well, including non-commercial projects, and make the space feel alive rather than hosting something occasional and always with a brand. For the customer who comes into Voo, it means they might discover an installation, or a piece that is being exhibited rather than sold.

I think that’s one of the best things we can do right now, particularly in these circumstances. Everyone is struggling financially, including us. In times like these, we need to do favours for one another and find ways to support each other. That’s really the mindset we have at the moment: being open, responsive and willing to act quickly when an opportunity or connection feels right.

I: That is also the beauty of being a small core team. If you like something, you can discuss it and realise it. There is no long process behind it, nothing complicated. It makes the change more exciting, because you move faster and you can do things without compromising.

A: It’s refreshing to name these circumstances as parameters that affect all of us, and to hear how they are beginning to inform your curatorial approach.

O: I would say one of the main considerations in the brands we continue to bring in is that they are independently run; people who are genuinely trying to sustain something, and whose work we believe in. When we see that, we want to support it in whatever way we can. So, at this point, independence is becoming one of the defining principles of our curatorial approach.

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Text: Anoe Melliou
Images: Courtesy of Voo Store