Five Approaches to Engaging Retail Experiences

The physical store must richly reward shoppers’ physical presence.

As a part of Tiffany’s 175th birthday celebration, Patten Studio created six Magic Mirrors to make Tiffany’s archival collection of multi-million dollar necklaces accessible to the public. As visitors to the Tiffany Diamond Pavilion in Shanghai, China, approach a Magic Mirror, the necklace on display levitates until it appears to rest on the visitor’s neck. Patten Studio designed custom software to enable this interaction, using 3D cameras and face-tracking technology. Selfies were shareable to Weibo. In collaboration with 2 x 4.

Increasingly, consumers can buy everything they need (and everything they don’t) online. Clothing, books, furniture, alcohol, electronics, mattresses — it’s hard to identify a market that hasn’t successfully pivoted to E-commerce. News outlets have been warning of an impending Retail Apocalypse for years, but if retail is truly dead then why are digitally native, direct to consumer brands opening flagships in major cities?

It is true that many brands have closed brick and mortar locations since the pandemic and many more are forestalling plans to expand, but the pandemic hasn’t irrevocably altered the future of retail. Covid-19 has just exacerbated problems brick and mortar has been facing for the past decade, problems that it will continue to face after the rollout of a vaccine; it has accelerated trends that were gaining momentum well before March of 2020.

Shoppers still crave in-store experiences. What brands need to contend with is customers’ radically different expectations regarding what the in-store shopping experience should look like. The store in 2021 — and 2121 — must be a site of experience, recreation, and community forming. In order to thrive, brands need to reimagine the “Retail Apocalypse” as a Retail Renaissance. In a world in which transaction doesn’t need brick and mortar, brick and mortar has to move beyond transaction.

At Patten Studio we specialize in using technology and interactivity to connect people to brands, places, and each other. In retail, this means that we create interactive store environments that deepen the connection between consumers and a brand. Here are five ways that brands we work with and brands we admire have been pushing the boundaries of brick and mortar retail through innovative design.

Immerse Customers in Your Brand Story

The more creative, unusual, and interactive your brand storytelling is, the more excited people will be to experience it. Beyond the product, an in-store experience is an opportunity for total brand immersion. By taking the focus off transaction and putting it on brand narrative, retail companies can strengthen customers’ brand loyalty. An immersive, interactive brand experience is far more personal than a print or digital advertisement. And a really engaging brand experience will generate organic content across social and news media.

Luxury companies like Tiffany & Co. and Cartier have in-house retail innovation teams dedicated to developing technologies and designing store environments that help these brands to attract a new generation of customers and entertain, and retain, their VIP clientele. When Tiffany’s opened its Blue Box Café in 2017, people waited hours to drink coffee and eat avocado toast in a room-sized Tiffany’s box, and everyone from Vanity Fair to the Washington Post covered it.

In order to create an immersive brand experience for customers visiting L’Occitane en Provence’s Toronto flagship store, Patten Studio created interactive wraparound video content for these eggshell-shaped “pods” and enabled touchless interactivity. Inside the pods, L’Occitane shoppers experience a multisensory journey that shares the brand’s history and follows the process by which L’Occitane’s products are made. In collaboration with creative agency School House. Photo by Arthur Mola.

Connect Your Brand Community

Increasingly we are coming to understand brands as communities of people: the people who buy their products, follow their social media pages, and, of course, visit their stores. These people want to connect to one another. They might interact in the comments section of a brand’s Instagram post, but the in-store experience gives your customers a chance to engage with one another face-to-face in addition to engaging with your brand and products. Nike is making the transition to smaller, community-specific stores that will act as sites of recreation and brand identity for Nike shoppers to gather in person to test products and engage with interactive features test piloted at its Nike Live concept store in Los Angeles. Similarly, clothing brand Universal Standard conceptualizes its flagship stores as “clubhouses” where its brand community is encouraged to gather and throw its own events.

Create Spectacle to Drive Foot Traffic

For a lot of people, in-store shopping is an activity, an outing, like going to the movies or going to a park. Retail clients often come to my studio asking about “wow” factor, and this is always a focus of our ideation process. If an experience evokes wonder, if it is unlike anything else, it’ll draw people to it for its own sake. People who are attracted to a retail store for the sake of experiencing it as a destination may not make a purchase in-store that same day, however, they are more likely to be converted into customers over time. Stores are where people become acquainted with brands; they are a form of advertising. Brick and mortar locations give brands an opportunity to make an impression.

Barneys New York was an early adopter of using spectacle to enliven brick and mortar through its famous window displays. Patten Studio created the above installation, The Chase, in celebration of Christian Louboutin’s iconic shoes. A pair of men’s shoes pursues a pair of stilettos around a plexiglass surface, with magnets embedded in the soles allowing each pair of shoes to be controlled by a separate electric circuit. Tension builds as the men’s shoes draw nearer to the stilettos, but each time the distance begins to close, the stilettos glide out of reach. Footage by Tom Sibley.

Offer a Shareable Selfie Moment

Every brand and retail activation wants the same thing: to go viral. But anyone who has tried to force a viral moment knows that the alchemy of what makes something irresistibly shareable is elusive. The best way to create highly shareable content is to focus on excellence of experience. You want to present your audience with something so interesting, so unlike anything they have seen before, that they will go and tell everyone they know about it.

In 2021, as brick and mortar more fully embraces experiential retail, the line between brand activation and retail environment will blur. For the Edge of the Sea, a brand activation for luxury cosmetics brand La Mer, Patten Studio used a range of media to synthesize an immersive seascape in five installations. A floating, kinetic sculpture made of silk undulates like an ocean wave. A responsive, projection mapped shoreline ripples and foams underfoot. A kelp forest is stirred by the current of bodies passing through it. Over the course of the 10 day exhibition at Shanghai’s Power Station of Art, more than 20,000 guests traveled through the Edge of the Sea into the heart of the La Mer brand. In collaboration with creative agency School House.

A recent brand activation that Patten Studio worked on with School House for La Mer, a luxury cosmetics brand and subsidiary of Estée Lauder, generated more than 1 billion social media impressions in 10 days. Instead of chasing trends and trying to recreate experiences that had proven successful on social media for other clients, we focused on La Mer’s unique brand narrative and the millennial Chinese consumer that the brand was courting through the activation. The event’s massive social media footprint can be attributed to the creation of an interactive experience that its target audience found so compelling it couldn’t resist the temptation to produce an artifact of that experience, a photograph, to share with friends and family.

There is no reason why a brand’s flagship store cannot host this sort of ultra-compelling, “shareable,” experience. In 2021, it will have to.

For Marshall Retail Group in LaGuardia Airport’s newly renovated Terminal B, Patten Studio created a shareable selfie moment for shoppers by designing an interactive mural display. A shopper’s likeness is “painted” into an iconic 5 Pointz graffiti artist’s work. Original mural by Dustin Spagnola. Footage by Ty Cole.

Reimagine Transaction

The unique pleasures of in-store shopping appear, on their surface, to be at direct odds with the COVID-19 pandemic and the need for social distancing. But this doesn’t have to be the case. Many brands are architecting in-store experiences that dispense with the need for lines altogether. Decentralized transaction models are gaining popularity.

At digitally native cosmetics retailer Glossier’s New York showroom, staff take shoppers’ orders via iPad and then their products appear in a pink parcel that descends from the ceiling, via a pulley system. The use of robots in retail stores to interface with shoppers and collect inventory data in real-time, and implementation of the BOPUS (buy online, pick up in store) model, will only be accelerated by the pandemic.

When it comes to store interiors, innovations that enable social distancing and contact-free checkout don’t have to be compromises: They can improve the shopping experience. Imagine a projection mapped floor that is responsive to, and conducts, shoppers’ foot traffic, providing interactive cues that help them to remain 6 feet away from one another. Or even an interactive maze that both partitions shoppers and gamefies the experience of in-store shopping.

Brick and mortar anchors a brand in a physical body. E-commerce will never be as dynamic, personal, and rewarding as the in-store shopping experience can be. By centering experience, retailers can breathe new life into their physical locations, and shoppers have a lot to gain from this innovation. The future of brick and mortar has the customer at its center.

James in the studio with Art Director Hortense Duthilleux.

James Patten is the Founder and Principal of Patten Studio, an experiential design lab that specializes in brand activations, retail innovation, and placemaking. He has been recognized in several international design competitions, including the International Design Magazine’s Annual Design Review and the International Design Excellence Awards. James earned his doctorate at the MIT Media Lab and is a TED Speaker and Senior Fellow.