We build the next stage of a brand's retail presence in America.

Inscape Retail Projects is a US general contractor for brands opening their first stores here, whether they are arriving from overseas or stepping out from behind a department-store concession. We translate the way American retail construction actually works — codes, work letters, permit cycles, sourcing — into a program you can run with confidence.

Every brand is on a rung. We build the next one up.

Most people in this business categorise brands by what they sell — apparel, jewellery, footwear, beauty, lifestyle — but in our experience the more useful frame is what rung of the physical-retail ladder a brand is on, because the construction problem on each rung is materially different from the one before it, and a partner who is good at the rung above yours is worth far more than a partner who happens to specialize in your category. The five rungs below cover most of the brands we talk to.

1. 01

   On someone else's shelves

   Your brand reaches US customers through wholesale, dealers and distributors, which means the construction problem belongs to the retailers stocking you rather than to your own team — until the day you decide that needs to change.

   →
2. 02

   Your space in their store

   You operate a concession or shop-in-shop inside a host retailer such as Nordstrom, Saks or Bloomingdale's, which gives you your own fixtures and your own staff but inside someone else's four walls, on their criteria package, with their install windows.

   →
3. 03

   Your first own store

   The first time you sign a lease in your own name and take on the work-letter exhibits, the permit timeline, the base-building turnover and the certificate of occupancy — usually a pop-up, a showroom or a first permanent location in a market where your concession is already producing.

   →
4. 04

   Your fleet

   A multi-store program, anywhere from five to fifty locations, where the same prototype opens in parallel across multiple markets and the work shifts from one-off project management to portfolio-level cost and schedule discipline.

   →
5. 05

   Your flagship

   An experiential, brand-led location that sits above the rest of the fleet on every dimension — square footage, finish budget, AV and lighting, press, event programming — and which usually requires a different design partner, a different lease, and a different construction conversation altogether.

Three starting points on the same ladder.

The brands we work with don't come to us because they fit a neat industry segment; they come to us because they are about to take a step they have never taken before, in a system they don't yet know well. The three card profiles below are the starting points we see most often, and the underlying delivery discipline is the same in each case — what changes is the counterparty (landlord, host retailer, or your own internal team) and the order in which the work happens.

01 — Overseas brands

Crossing a border into your first US stores.

You have a proven concept at home, you have a real-estate broker telling you that the US market is ready, and you have a board that wants the first store open inside the next year — but you are about to discover that almost nothing about the way construction works in the United States behaves the way it does in your home market, from the state-by-state variance in building codes through to the work-letter exhibits that quietly move scope onto the tenant, the permit timelines that range from a few weeks in some cities to most of a year in others, the regional rather than national trade procurement, and the fact that none of your home-market finishes have a one-for-one US equivalent.

How we build for overseas brands →

02 — Wholesale & department-store

From their shelves to your store.

You already have a US presence inside Nordstrom, Saks, Bloomingdale's or one of the equivalent host retailers, and you have a few hundred square feet of your fixtures inside their box producing the kind of numbers that justify the next conversation, which is whether the time has come to sign a lease in your own name and open a standalone — and although the fixture kit you built for the concession is largely the same kit that will furnish your first standalone, the construction discipline required to deliver that standalone has very little in common with the discipline required to install a concession overnight inside an operating department store.

How we build the shelf-to-store leap →

03 — DTC & digital-native

Going physical for the first time.

You have built a digital business that now has the customer base, the brand equity and the operating discipline to justify a physical presence, but the store program your team is about to take on is unlike the retail playbooks the major specialty retailers use — you are working with shorter leases, faster opening windows, higher experiential design intensity, lower square footages, and a buyer (usually a VP Marketing or Head of Brand rather than a Director of Construction) whose approval process is wired for brand and content moments rather than for permit cycles.

How we build for DTC brands →

How a US rollout actually unfolds.

Every brand we begin a program with sees these five phases on day one and then receives a weekly status report against them for the life of the work, and although there is a small amount of variation per market and per brand, the durations below are the ones we have actually observed across recent programs rather than the optimistic ranges a contractor will sometimes quote in a pitch. The permit step in particular is jurisdictional and not negotiable, which is why brands that compress the early phases almost always pay for that compression later.

The numbers we can stand behind.

Almost every US retail GC publishes a stat strip with numbers like “projects delivered”, “states covered” and “decades in business”, and almost none of those numbers survive contact with a serious vendor onboarding form — so we publish only what we can defend with either a delivered project or an operational practice that we genuinely run.