Visual Design · Retail & Brand
Decathlon
India
I was there when it was one store. Today it is 130 and counting. A decade before sports retail was a category in India, we were building the blueprint, store by store, design by design.
Client
Decathlon India
Location and Duration
India · Founding years
Role
Founding Design Team · Concept Store Designer
Deliverables
Impact
Designs replicated across all 130+ stores nationwide
Before sport retail
was even a word
When Decathlon decided to enter India, there was no playbook. No comparable retail category. No established visual language for a mass-market sports brand in the subcontinent. What there was, was a small, pioneering team with the task of building something from nothing.
I was part of that founding team. My brief was to design a concept store that would become the template for every Decathlon that followed. The challenge was to make a global brand feel local, make a warehouse-scale retail space feel human, and make sport feel accessible to every Indian.
The concept store I designed was not just a retail environment. It was a statement of intent for what sport retail in India could be. Clear wayfinding. Sport-category zoning. Environmental graphics that celebrated movement and aspiration. A visual system disciplined enough to scale.
From one store to one hundred and thirty. The principles held. The system scaled. The design endured.
The Beginning
Joining the founding team
Brought on as part of the core team tasked with establishing Decathlon's retail presence in India. At the time, there was one location and a blank canvas.
The Brief
Designing the concept store
Developed the visual identity system for the concept store, covering spatial layout principles, signage, category graphics, colour language and the overall retail environment. This was the document that every future store would reference.
The System
Designs that could scale
The real test of any retail design system is replication. The principles I established were clear, modular and adaptable to different store sizes and city contexts, which is why they could be applied uniformly across an expanding national network.
The Legacy
130 stores and counting
Today Decathlon India operates more than 130 stores and continues to grow. Every one of those stores carries the visual DNA of the concept work done in those founding years. That is what design at scale looks like.
The work,
in full
The complete visual design catalogue for Decathlon India. Browse every page of the brand system, concept store designs and environmental graphics that became the foundation for one of India's fastest-growing retail networks.
