Rob Forbes, founder of furniture retailer Design Within Reach and, more recently, bicycle retailer PUBLIC, will deliver the Closing Keynote address at IRDC 2011 on Friday, September 9.
Forbes’s presentation, Visual Immersion and the Retail Mindset, will focus on the unexpected sources of inspiration that can fuel your creativity as a designer of retail experiences.
Best known for launching Design Within Reach in 1998, making modern furniture and design available to the masses, Forbes left the company in 2007 to open Studio Forbes, the San Francisco pad from which he launched PUBLIC in 2009.
PUBLIC is, at this point, largely an online business, but the colorful bikes, designed primarily for city dwellers, appeared in pop-up shops within Gap stores during the 2010 holiday season. They’re available in select DWR stores and bicycle shops around the country, and at the sole PUBLIC store (also brand headquarters) in San Francisco’s SoMa neighborhood, where the brand celebrated its first anniversary last weekend.
