I really loved discovering China Town and working on it, and comparing it to Fifth Avenue. I learned a lot of things, and I would say that it is the project that opened my mind the most. I was already informed by counterfeiting because I had a 6 months long project to do for the French Baccalaureate, that I passes last year. My subject was: What are the issues and the ways to fight the counterfeiting luxury items in the European countries? I did a video showing different aspects. I learned so much from this project and it gave me the chance to look in a different way and think in a different for this project. I really liked working on that because my studies on the project were in Europe compare to here where I studied the contrast in America. I learned how everything was based on the sales in Chinatown. After observing the store, the salesman, the displays, I understood that they needed money to live and that selling was the most important thing. They are ready to negociate, I had this experience when I was collecting informations.
The biggest contrast I found between Canal Street and Fifth avenue, was the kindness and the customer service. In Chinatown, they are very aggressive and very loud, compare to Fifth avenue where they are very polite and always being careful about your needs. In our project we represented China town as the overwhelming of the objects, the perfume precisely in our display. Fifth avenue was represented as a very clean and original display, a cage. We chose that because, generally in the luxury stores, some products are presented that way. I would imagine a women like my mother shopping in that store. My mother is not the typical shopping addict. She likes to dress well but she doesn’t like to be where everyone is and where it is extremely fancy and luxurious. I would see her buy products on displays like the one we designed. I think our display would be successful but only for a certain category of people, because for example, certain people like to shop in very clear environment where the products are displayed in a more spacious way.
One important thing that I learned in this project was collaboration. We had different ideas to combine together, and we found a way to make it work. It also taught me how different New York city was from the north to the south and after this journey I feel more like a “New Yorker”. I understood different mindset that were in New York, and it felt good to see that everything is so different. I have already been to China Town but didn’t observe it that way at all, because I didn’t pay attention to it. I would have thought it was the same “New York” as everywhere if I didn’t analyze precisely like I did for this project. This experience was very enriching on my side.