Digital Twins For Retail Design

Part 7 of our Gaussian Splatting series a thinking piece. Part 5 showed designing inside a scanned store; this asks what it takes for that scan to earn the name "digital twin."

1. What does "digital twin" actually mean in your type of work?

A digital twin in our work fundamentally differs from a digital twin in manufacturing, processing, or warehouse environments because in retail, the actual physical product is generally not included in the twin.

Think of a retail store's merchandise: clothing, cellular devices, FMCG products. These don't belong in the digital twin. Why? Because merchandisers don't leave shelving and merchandise in the same place. They keep adapting the store to flow in the best manner possible for each season, each campaign, each shift in climate and client behaviour they take note of over the course of a calendar year. The store gets many different expressions, some of them flows we never intended, and responding to that is the merchandiser's responsibility

It cannot also be the store designer's responsibility, because the store designer is always looking forward: the next store deployment, the next store in a different province, the next store that needs renovating. The merchandiser operates at a far more granular level.

So in retail, the digital twin is an expression of the initial placement: wall shelving, freestanding shelving, gondola-end shelving, island shelving, and the experiential environments. The frame, not the ever-changing contents.

2. When does it become more than just a nice-looking scan?

When it becomes an early expression of the store in which the merchandiser, the store manager, and the C-suite team can define the store's real capacity: how much of the floor is usable space for the number of unique SKUs available, the number of unique products the store wants to sell, or the number of individual brands the store wants to host in a given department.

That's when the twin starts doing retail work. Inside it, we place as many products as prominently as possible and build the hierarchy; the premier shelving positions, then B, C, and D-grade positions with the hero product, the discount product, and the sale products each positioned deliberately around the store.

It's also where sightlines become designable: the window display sections, the see-through lines where a customer can read two departments at once all of it visible and intentional rather than accidental. And it's where the larger department-store thinking lives: destination areas like the restaurant or food section placed purposefully, so the customer goes on a journey of exploring the store before arriving at them.

The point is that when we create a digital twin, we can discover and experience that flow walk it, test it, argue about it before the store environment is even built.

3. How could a retailer use this for planning, approvals, or rollouts?

Where question two was about designing the store's logic, this is about moving the project through its gates. The digital twin functions across multiple levels of approval:

Concept approval. We block out a scheme in conceptual development a block model showing the width, height, and depth of the shelving. That's enough for a first sign-off without a single detailed drawing.

Flow and safety. From the block scheme we create a flow diagram, making sure for fire and safety, and for the merchandiser that the space between product placements is left wide enough.

Stakeholder approvals. Between the merchandiser, the construction company, and the municipal officer, approvals need to be in place for aesthetics, costing, suppliers, manufacturing, and installation — and the municipal worker needs to sign off on the plans so the submission can be completed.

Landlord approval. Sometimes the mall, strip mall, or shopping complex we operate in also needs to approve our floor plans, elevations, and window displays.

Rollout. And last, our construction teams and third-party manufacturing and installation companies need to navigate our designs so that what they build for us actually fits within our plans.

One twin, five gates — each party reading the same model at the level of detail they need.

4. What is the danger of using "digital twin" as a buzzword?

"Digital twin" has featured high in the design world for the last two to three years, usually riding alongside BIM Building Information Modelling. And BIM is an extremely detailed, highly layered body of information.

The logic of BIM: as you develop a specialism malls, residential complexes, certain types of public facilities you develop a design language, and quite early in a process you can commit to certain materials and standards. You attach attributes to those materials and elements that explain their details. You are modelling with the building information attached. That's what makes BIM effective and efficient.

BIM also comes with levels of detail: LOD 100, 200, 300, 400. At LOD 100, in concept, you call something a brick wall, a concrete floor, a glass facade, a wooden ceiling, a painted or wallpapered interior. By LOD 300 or 400, you are expected to describe the brickwork itself: the way the bricks are laid, the way the grouting is spaced and finished because the contractor laying that brick needs the right bricks, the right grouting mixture, the right pattern. That information travels as CSV files, IFC documentation, or annotations on a 2D drawing. In the conceptual phase you don't need it; a change of bond pattern changes the facade's aesthetic, not the parking layout. But by construction, that detail is the project.

Here is the danger: when we use "digital twin" or "Gaussian splatting" as buzzwords, we risk downgrading that level-of-detail rigour. A digital twin is not simply a Gaussian splat expressed in a PLY, SPZ, or LCC file. For a scan to be a twin, LOD 200 or 300 information needs to be attributed to it so the model can actually be read or an as-built Revit or SketchUp model needs to be positioned inside, or overlaid onto, the Gaussian splat, so the technical detail remains visible within the physical reality capture.

The splat is the skin. The twin needs a skeleton of information underneath it.

5. What would a useful retail digital twin need to include?

Pulling it together, a retail digital twin worth the name includes:

• The SKU and brand capacity of the store, per department

• Customer flow: the navigable widths, depths, and heights

• Services: sprinkler installation, ventilation and air conditioning

• Lighting: lux intensity zoned correctly: the control zone as you enter, deeper in the store approaching the point of sale, and in the changing rooms

• The as-built drawings, overlaid with the scan

The digital twin and the Gaussian splat bring different information together and together with the as-built drawings, these multi-layered informations can be mapped through a tool like Trimble Connect or Trimble ProjectSight to show that the overlay creates no clash collisions: that every layer of information has contributed to the right output.

What we're really trying to create is a standard under which everyone can design, quantify, cost, build, and experience the final design. Done well, there is a uniformity to the work that lets us operate centrally between contractors, suppliers, designers, and investor-stakeholders. Without that standard, it's almost as if we're speaking different languages learning a new one, or at least a new dialect, with every work opportunity. There must be room for experience and intuition alongside it, but the effectiveness comes from all speaking the same language.

For questions, email hello@studiojdb.com.

Part 6, Why Texture Size Matters, Next in series: SketchUp Before The Final Render