Behind The Making of the Bandit Chicago Flagship

It was exactly 862 days, or 2.36 years from our first Chicago Marathon pop-up in 2022, to the day a group of us from Bandit HQ boarded a plane to view potential locations for our 4th, and biggest store yet. That day, the wind chill hit -20°F, but that didn't stop the excitement from powering us through viewing over 10 potential locations, all crammed into our real estate broker's car, making best friends with her rear seat heating vents.

Truth be told, our chosen location, now open at 1708 N. Damen, was the last stop on the day's frozen tundra tour, and as soon as we walked into the big box of a blank-slate space, it immediately felt like the type of canvas that we could express the Bandit spirit through most effectively. The store being within a tennis ball throw to the beautiful 2.7 mile stretch of the greenery-laced running path known as the 606 was the clincher. We left Chicago optimistic, with this space cleanly checking the boxes for the vision we've had for finally bringing Bandit to one of our favorite cities, and ready for the real work to begin.

Then came lease negotiations. The only major factor for the team was whether or not the landlord would approve a full makeover of the facade of the building. We were drawn to the steel framing, and commercially translated aesthetic of modernism, and at the same time, it was important that we'd have the flexibility to give it a bit of a refresh to cohesively bring both the top floor (an apartment unit) and our retail space below to allow the building to more formally stand out and on it's own in the neighborhood. After a two months of those details being solidified and that vision being approved, our team flew back out to Chicago to meet with our design partners/the mad geniuses at HARDGOODS to kick things off.

Our initial discussions review both technical specification (how many products do we aim to have displayed at all times), to our wishlist of community and member-specific features of the store (member fridge, cafe & custom-designed lossless sound system), to the elements of Chicago that we wanted to organically integrate into the space to merge our identity seamlessly with one of our new home bases. For Chicago, we were drawn to the work of it's very own Bauhaus trained pioneer of modernism, Mies Van Der Rohe. 

You'll see in the final design (interior photos below), we sought to take the modernist shape of the building, and the boxed nature of the room, and combining that with the Mies design language of curvilinear forms existing seamlessly with more rigid shapes and forms. 

Then, we look to solidify our aesthetic sensibilities through various design exercises, all striving to clarify the vision and create an upfront alignment with our design team. The "this is cool" "I hate this" activity being a team favorite.

Then, the fun part begins. Design rounds, permitting, picking the general contractor team. Floor plan options (18 total different variations before we landed on the setup) and finally onto the build. That's the tough part and a piece by piece process as work alongside our design team, painstakingly ensuring that all of the proportions and the dreams that have been iterated over 5 months on paper and in digital form come to life exactly as planned.

Early design drafts of the floor plan.

3D renders from round 5 of 10 full rounds of design drafting and iteration.

After a nearly 10 month process, the doors are open. Interior photos here, and at the bottom a full list of the design elements integrated into the space.