2025 PAVE International Design Competition

How do you design a sweet moment inside the everyday? The 2025 PAVE International Design Competition, backed by The Hershey Company, asks exactly that. It invites students from around the world to propose a “Store-within-a-Store” snacking destination inside a grocery store—an experience zone that mixes retail, branding, architecture, and delight.

Rather than a standard shop or kiosk, the competition aims for a space that turns grabbing a snack into an event. It prompts designers to think about how architecture and interiors can enhance brand identity, display products attractively, guide flow, create emotional pull, and respond to context. In a world where online shopping increasingly dominates, this challenge asks: can in-store design still surprise, entice, and connect people physically to brands and place?

The competition is open to students globally, across disciplines like architecture, interior design, industrial design, branding, UX/UI, and related fields. Teams or individuals can participate. The submission is a compact package: a landscape PDF up to 10 pages (excluding cover and references), with high-quality renderings (hand, computer, or AI with disclosure). Submissions must be blind (no names or school identifiers).

With a modest registration barrier (free to enter) and generous awards, PAVE 2025 is an enticing design test. Let’s dive into its structure, challenges, and what it teaches us about architectural thinking in retail and experiential design.

Competition Structure & Guidelines

What the Competition Is

PAVE 2025 challenges designers to embed a snacking destination within a grocery store setting. This store-within-a-store must feel distinct, brand-infused, yet integrated with the host environment. Submissions may include floor plan, section, elevations, visualizations, branding narratives, lighting design, material palettes, and spatial flow strategies.

Who Can Enter

Open to undergraduate and graduate students worldwide. Disciplines include architecture, interior design, industrial design, retail planning, branding, graphic design, UX/UI, or related fields.

Submission Requirements

• Pre-registration via platform (e.g. Submittable) to access the full brief
• A landscape 11×17 inch PDF, max 10 pages, excluding cover and references
• Strong renderings (hand, CG, or AI if disclosed)
• Blind entry (no identification info)

Fees, Awards & Timeline

Table: Competition Fees

Table: Awards & Prizes

Table: Timeline

Content & Themes

Designing with Brand Experience in Mind

The core of this competition lies in blending architecture with brand storytelling. The snacking space shouldn’t just sell chocolate—it should evoke Hershey’s identity through gesture, materiality, and atmosphere. Designers must think about sensory cues: lighting warmth, texture of surfaces, display choreography that guides movement and focus.

Integrating into the Grocery Flow

Because this is inside an existing grocery environment, proposals must respect circulation, sightlines, adjacency, and overall spatial constraints. The snack zone should feel special but not disruptive. It might use transparent partitions, lighting thresholds, or subtle elevation changes to delineate zones.

Spatial Economy & Visual Clarity

With only up to 10 pages allowed, clarity and efficiency are paramount. A strong submission communicates intent lucidly—plan, section, axonometric, detail, and visual narrative must work together cleanly. Overly complex diagrams or overly decorative visuals might detract from clarity.

Innovation vs Feasibility

A successful proposal balances creativity with realism. Bold, imaginative ideas are welcome—but they must hint at practical buildability, cost constraints, and installation within a grocery context. Proposals that lean too futuristic without grounding risk losing credibility.

Architectural Analysis

The design logic for a snacking hub within a grocery store revolves around juxtaposition and coexistence. It needs to feel separate yet part of the whole. Materials play a subtle role: warm woods, matte metals, glass partitions, textured tile or terrazzo floors—all can demarcate while harmonizing. Light should emphasize product display, create transitions, and support legibility at different times of day.

Context is key: grocery store lighting is often harsh and fluorescent; the snack space must either adapt or transform its light environment to feel distinct and inviting. The design may borrow from pavilion techniques—floating ceilings, canopy elements, or framing devices. Transparency is both an aesthetic and strategic choice; carefully positioned openings let glimpses of snacks draw people in.

A critical lens: how far can brand immersion go before the space becomes a billboard more than architecture? Some proposals might lean heavily into visual identity, risking the loss of spatial depth or tactile experience. A reflective approach must ask whether the design serves people first, product second.

Project Importance

This competition teaches designers how architecture and branding intersect in interior retail spaces. It highlights the value of experiential spatial design—creating places, not just shop fronts. It pushes students to think about hybrid typologies: part retail, part installation, part social encounter.

It contributes to architectural thinking by showing how small insertions—a kiosk or nook—can carry identity, influence circulation, and shape user behavior. In a time when physical retail must compete with online convenience, well-crafted small architectural interventions matter more.

The relevance now is strong: we’re seeing renewed interest in experiential retail and phygital spaces. Projects like these hint at how small architectural inserts can revive in-store experiences, bridging brand, product, and place. The lessons carry beyond chocolate kiosks; they apply to pop-ups, museums, cultural displays, and any embedded space within a larger architecture.

✦ ArchUp Editorial Insight

This design competition underscores how architecture can mediate between brand and public space. Submissions must balance visual identity and spatial use, and push innovation while remaining grounded. The tension between immersive branding and genuine spatial quality is worth scrutinizing, but the competition’s greatest strength lies in fostering small yet powerful architectural gestures in everyday contexts.

Conclusion

The PAVE 2025 Design Competition offers a compact but rich challenge: design a snacking destination inside a grocery store that feels both branded and spatially meaningful. The competition asks students to think deeply about how architecture can enhance brand experience and create memorable moments in quotidian environments.

What makes this project compelling is its scale—it’s not a large building, but a refined intervention. That demands precision in circulation, materiality, light, and narrative. It tests how you can embed identity into architecture without overshadowing the everyday flow.

In an era where physical retail must reinvent itself, this competition’s lessons are timely. It shows that small architectural insertions can carry brand meaning, mediate commerce and experience, and revitalize how we interact with products and space. For architects and designers, it’s a chance to sharpen skills in narrative, detail, and context.

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