A boutique fixed without looking fixed
Retail · design target set by customer experience, not a regulation
Illustrative worked example. This is a realistic brief run through Echo using the same method a real report uses — not an account of a named past client. See every case study for more, including which of these are real, permissioned projects as they're added.
The brief
An independent fashion boutique's staff were increasingly unable to hear customers' questions on busy Saturdays, and the store manager was clear about one thing before any options were discussed: nothing that looked like an acoustic panel was going anywhere near the minimalist sales floor.
Boutique sales floor with fitting rooms
18 × 10 × 4 m, about 720 m³ — polished concrete floor, painted brick walls, exposed services ceiling, full-height mirror wall.
Concrete, brick, exposed services and a full-height mirror left almost nothing soft in the room, putting it at roughly 1.15 seconds — the direct cause of the till-point mishearing that had staff repeatedly asking customers to repeat themselves.
The standard, and the target
There's no statutory target for a retail floor, so the brief was customer and staff experience: a shop where a question at the till doesn't need repeating, without the room reading as anything other than the brand's minimalist look — in practice, something in the 0.7 to 0.8 second range.
The constraint
The full-height mirror wall was central to the fitting-room experience and non-negotiable, and the brand's minimalist visual identity ruled out anything that looked like a conventional acoustic panel anywhere on the sales floor.
The decision
Fabric-faced panels were printed and framed to read as artwork rather than acoustic treatment, on the one wall clear of mirror and glazing; a thick wool rug went into the seating area outside the fitting rooms, doubling as a customer-experience upgrade; and baffles were tucked above the till point into the existing clutter of the exposed-services ceiling, where they read as part of the look rather than an addition.
Every route considered, vendor-neutral — we don't sell any of it.
- Framed fabric panels, disguised as artworkabout 16 m²
The only wall without mirror or glazing to work around.
- Wool rug, fitting-room seating areaabout 18 m²
Doubles as a customer-experience upgrade, not just an acoustic fix.
- Baffles above the till pointabout 8 m²
Tucked into the existing exposed-services ceiling clutter, invisible from the floor.
The outcome
The three changes brought the floor from roughly 1.15 seconds to around 0.75, and staff at the till could hear a customer's question from across the till point without asking them to repeat it — with nothing on the sales floor that reads as an acoustic fix.
Indicative figures for this example, from the same method a real report uses. Not a measured survey and not a compliance certificate — where one is required, that's a survey to BS EN ISO 3382-2.
Now do it for your room.
Four questions, sixty seconds. Free to see whether you have a problem.
Check my room →Questions people ask
Isn't disguising panels as artwork a gimmick?
It's the same Class-A absorptive material as a conventional panel, printed and framed — the acoustic performance doesn't change, only how it reads on the wall, which was the store manager's explicit condition before any option was proposed.
Why not treat the mirror wall too?
It was ruled out before the brief started — the fitting-room mirror wall was non-negotiable, so the fix had to find enough absorption from the remaining surfaces alone, which it did.
Is 0.7–0.8 seconds a retail standard?
No — there's no regulation for a shop floor. It's a design judgement based on what a comfortable, conversational retail space typically measures at, not a cited figure.