FMLK store opens in Colombo creating unique user-experience bridging digital and physical realities

• Popular online fashion retailer Fashionmarket’s physical incarnation was opened on Green Path adding a new dimension to Sri Lanka’s retail landscape, permanently housing its best-selling designer labels including ‘Urban Drape’ sarees 
  
   

FMLK – a brick-and-mortar retail experience presented by Sri Lanka’s online fashion retail leader www.fashionmarket.lk came alive on 19 March at its city-central location on Green Path, amidst fashion, design, business and media communities. The store revealed its unusual concept where the modern fashion consumer’s

FMLK founder Linda Speldewinde

digitally integrated life was mirrored in a retail experience by using technology to augment how we discover, shop, choose and purchase fashion. 

FMLK store launch included a runway featuring new collections, and several informal expressions of thought-provoking ideas by a number of social, cultural, business and creative influencers. These expressions revolved around ideas like how fashion empowers people from makers to wearers, what makes a new Sri Lankan style movement, technology and design, the saree and Sri Lanka’s modern fashion culture, as well as the relevance of a locally rooted contemporary men’s style movement. FMLK store is now open for shoppers to experience the clothes they see online on www.fashionmarket.lk, and elevate their consumer experience to a new level between the digital and physical worlds.

FMLK founder Linda Speldewinde stated that FMLK came to life as a response to an obvious niche in the market for a phygital retail experience. “After fashionmarket.lk paved the way as a major fashion ecommerce success out of Sri Lanka, we really saw how it just erupted in the island, giving rise to so many young online brands. We thought this was great. Four years down the line, we felt it’s time to create a new ‘in-between’ experience because this really is the time for it, given what’s going on with future of brick-and-mortar retail and our consumers’ urge to have a deeper connection with how they experience products, without compromising the convenience they found in e-commerce. This is the future of retail, and we’re thrilled to present it from Colombo.”

At the newly opened store, FMLK’s brand philosophy ‘a new Sri Lankan style’ was seen reflected in everything presented on the runway and within the space. FMLK effectively captures Sri Lanka’s modern metropolitan sense of ‘island cool’ with a new east-meets-west aesthetic that bears relevance to a vast spectrum of modern identities, like urban professionals, everyday heroes to cultural icons. 

The designer brands housed at FMLK are often created by refreshing mixes of young talent homegrown by AOD – design catalyst of Sri Lanka, working side by side with veterans in Sri Lankan textile design and village artisans in various crafts. Among the brands housed at FMLK, is ‘Urban Drape’ – the saree brand gaining popularity throughout South Asia, with a growing reputation as a contemporary designer saree brand that looks to evoke the new-age woman in all honesty. Overall, the FMLK collection is season-less and designed to work anywhere in the world from Colombo to New York; and even in its online presence, it has been embraced by consumers from India, US, Australia and Singapore. 

With phygital experiences that seamlessly fuse brick-and-mortar retail with consumer realities, exciting ways to incorporate handheld technology for highly personalised shopping, trend research and style picks, FMLK is probably Sri Lanka’s most interesting response to the current shifts in the global retail business.

FMLK is now open for business at 50, Green Path, Colombo 3 from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. For more information reach 0767771353/[email protected].

Pix by Sameera Wijesinghe