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Retail Brew

Store Design

Andrew Adam Newman

retailbrew.com

Elon Musk’s X added Nestlé, Colgate-Palmolive, Tyson Foods and other companies to a suit first filed in August alleging that when the companies pulled their advertising from the platform, for reasons including antisemitic content and loosening content moderation, the companies were violating antitrust laws. The suit alleges that the companies, along with the trade group World Federation of Advertisers, were illegally conspiring against X.

 Were advertisers acting legally when they pulled their ads from X, or was it a violation of antitrust laws? 

, after Walgreens CEO Tim Wentworth acknowledged that locked display cases had hurt sales and the company was looking at alternative strategies to address shoplifting, we asked whether you thought the locked cases were a good solution.

More than 8 out of 10 of you (82.5%) said that locked display cases were 

 a good solution to shoplifting, while just 14% of you thought the cases were a good solution and 3.5% of you didn’t know or weren’t sure.

Anti-theft locked beauty products with customer service button at Walgreens pharmacy, Queens, New York

More than 8 out of 10 say locked display cases not a solution for shoplifting. 

Plus, was pulling ads from X illegal? 

Hot Topic: More than 8 out of 10 say locked display cases not a solution for shoplifting

Locked display cases, the theft-prevention measure that makes shopping less grab-and-go and more wait-and-see, aim to prevent shoplifting, but a new survey suggests that particular solution might be worse than the problem.

Upon discovering that an item they want to buy is in a locked case, less than one in three shoppers (32%) get a store employee to unlock the case, according to a reader survey from 

, a consumer advocacy website. For 55% of respondents, it’s a lost sale, because when a product is locked up, they try to buy it elsewhere. The remaining 13% try to find an alternative product in the same store that is 

The online survey of 1,124 readers was conducted from September 2 through September 9.

Edgar Dworsky, a consumer advocate who publishes Consumer World, knows how he would have filled out his survey.

“If I encounter a locked case, I’m not going to start looking for a store clerk going up and down every aisle or pressing the button and waiting for someone to come over,” Dworsky told Retail Brew. “But the fact that it was over 50% of people that felt the way I did? I was really surprised.”

Dworsky acknowledged that the results might be skewing high because it was an opt-in survey that readers took rather than a random one, and said his audience tends to be “interested in consumer matters,” which may mean they have a lower threshold for consumer inconvenience.

 have put much of their inventory behind glass in recent years as a response to what they call organized retail crime, shoplifting rings that have been captured in 

. But some have said the scope of the problem has been 

 noted that retail executives seem to be sounding the alarm less about theft, which they speak about under the rubric of “shrink.” Mentions of “shrink” on earnings calls for the first two quarters of 2024 were down 20% compared to the same period a year ago according to a FactSet analysis cited by CNN.

“A year ago, America’s stores declared a shoplifting epidemic,” stated the CNN article. “This year, retailers are telling a very different story—or no story at all. It’s as if the shoplifting crisis suddenly vanished.”

Dworsky said he is “not a loss-prevention expert” and doesn’t claim to have a solution for the ubiquity of locked cases.

“This is a no-win situation,” he said. “If you leave all the stuff there, from what I hear, they’re being robbed blind by shoplifters; if you lock it up, you’re annoying customers and losing sales. Either way, the retailer loses.”

“It’s become routine to discover entire aisles transformed into untouchable

product galleries armored in plexiglass,” Amanda Mull wrote about locked cases in 

 in August. “The whole thing has a whiﬀ of pawnshop, which might actually be unfair to pawnshops.”

The challenge could be an existential one for stores.

“If stores lock up too much stuﬀ, they cease to be stores—they become giant vending machines with no place to insert your money,” Mull wrote. “For a lot of shoppers, those locked shelves become another reason to avoid in-person shopping and hand their business over to Amazon.”

Two in three shoppers won’t buy products in locked display cases

Most end up trying to find the product in another store, according to a Consumer World survey.

This is the fourth and final installment of our series about the state of store design today. 

When the pandemic elevated online shopping, some predicted 

 of brick-and-mortar stores—the thinking being that even when in-person shopping felt safe again, the convenience of e-commerce would render stores irrelevant.

But that’s not what’s happening. At their best, a new crop of stores have become destinations, beckoning shoppers with creative displays that encourage testing products, design flairs that have them reaching for phones to snap photos for social media, and activities that reconnect them with neighbors.

A new Radio Flyer store outside Chicago, for instance, 

 for kids to test bikes and scooters, while a Petco in New York has a pet-grooming area that looks like 

, transforming what can be a messy service that’s often shielded from view into entertainment.

Snarkitecture, a New York-based design practice founded by architect Alex Mustonen and artist Daniel Arsham, is known for introducing elements in retail environments that are artistic, elegant, and lapel-grabbing.

“We come from the artistic perspective where…We look at problems in a different way that’s a bit more playful, that’s a bit more interactive, that’s a bit more immersive,” Alexander Buckeridge, Snarkitecture’s director, told Retail Brew.

Here are four examples of what Buckeridge refers to as artistic or architectural “interventions” that Snarkitecture has included in its retail store designs:

Basketball Run, Center Court arena shop, Rocket Mortgage Fieldhouse, Cleveland

The marble run kinetic sculpture with white basketballs at the Center Court arena shop in the Rocket Mortgage Fieldhouse in Cleveland.

Center Court is a two-story store in Cleveland’s Rocket Mortgage Fieldhouse that sells merch for the teams that play there—the Cleveland Cavaliers and Cleveland Monsters. There’s an atrium in the center where a four-sided jumbotron used to be located, but Snarkitecture had something much different in mind.

The firm designed a two-story kinetic sculpture reminiscent of the marble runs that kids (

) build. White basketballs, custom designed by Ashram, continuously roll down the contraption, which has a mechanism that returns the balls to the top.

 The marble run kinetic sculpture with white basketballs at the Center Court arena shop in the Rocket Mortgage Fieldhouse in Cleveland.

“What we wanted to do is create this kind of playful, interactive moment and experiential moment,” Buckeridge said. “We’re interested in kind of imaginative ideas and bringing that kind of joy and playfulness to a serious situation sometimes.”

A chandelier made of white sneakers at the Kith flagship store in Paris. 

As part of its design for Kith’s sprawling 16,000-square-foot Paris flagship, Snarkitecture designed a massive chandelier from which hung not crystals, but rather 200 white sneakers. The sneakers are cast-resin versions of Nike’s Air Max 1’s, a favorite of sneakerheads that was 

Hundreds of white sneakers hang toe-down from an arched ceiling at Kith's flagship store in Paris. 

The sneakers are recurring design elements in the store, including hundreds hanging toe-down from the arched ceiling in one of the store’s hallways.

Snarkitecture has used white resin models of shoes as design elements in other Kith stores, including 750 cast-resin Nike Air Jordan 

, which were part of its redesign for a Brooklyn store in 2015.

Astronaut Sculpture, Billionaire Boys Club, Miami

An astronaut sculpture at a Billionaire Boys Club store in Miami 

An astronaut is the logo for Billionaire Boys Club, the brand founded by Pharrell Williams and Nigo in 2003. And it’s a seven-foot bronze astronaut, created by Ashram, that is the centerpiece for the brand’s flagship store in Miami.

“This sculptural astronaut became the focal point of the whole store,” Buckeridge said.

The irregularly shaped portals between rooms at the Gant flagship store in Stockholm. 

The three-story, 6,000-square-foot Gant flagship is located in a historic building in Stockholm and features rooms with varied themes, including the Lounge, Den, and Locker Room.

But it’s not mere doorways that separate the rooms. Rather, the passageways are odd, asymmetric shapes (Buckeridge calls them “cutaways”), as if the 

The shapes are an “unusual profile that ultimately creates drama, creates kind of a quest for the unknown,” Buckeridge said.

Interesting thresholds may draw shoppers through to see what’s on offer.

“You’re getting lured when you see a door like that,” Buckeridge said. “It entices you to go through it.”

It’s just one example of a brand engaging with customers in a way that pixels on an e-commerce site can’t.=

“There’s a real appetite for experiential design within retail,” he said. “They’re really looking for spaces and places to represent the brand in a physical way.”

A gif of the marble run kinetic sculpture with white basketballs at the Center Court arena shop in the Rocket Mortgage Fieldhouse in Cleveland.

Why Snarkitecture builds artistic ‘interventions’ in retail stores

A basketball marble run. A sneaker chandelier. A life-sized astronaut. Meet the firm breathing spectacle, play, and adventure into store design. 

Why Snarkitecture builds artistic ‘interventions’ in retail stores 

This is the third installment of our series about the state of store design today. 

Since the height of the pandemic, when e-commerce 

 about the future of brick-and-mortar stores. With e-commerce so convenient and—let’s use one of retail’s favorite buzzwords—

, what could lure shoppers off their couches?

In London, one answer to how to get consumers to leave their homes is a store that demonstrates how those homes can be more technologically sophisticated.

EE, one of the UK’s largest telecommunications companies, opened a new flagship in 2023 in the Westfield London shopping center in the capital’s White City district. Mobile carriers and internet service providers, like Verizon and Comcast on US shores, tend to be boutique-sized, which is plenty of space to show the latest phone models and accessories, but the new store occupies 4,230 square feet of space.

More than just showcasing products, it functions in some ways like a science museum, with what the brand calls “experience zones” that essentially are interactive exhibits. Each evokes a different room of the home and demonstrates how technology could transform those rooms.

A smart kitchen display in EE’s London flagship store.

Richard Bennett, creative director at London’s Dalziel & Pow, which designed EE Studio in collaboration with Your Studio, explained that the store was designed to be an “experiential platform” to tell a “connected home technology story.”

Bennett said stores need to embrace such trends as storytelling and experiential design to engage consumers.

“Stores that were all about getting stuff—having things on shelves available to me so that I could go and pick it up when I needed—they became irrelevant because you don’t need that anymore,” Bennett told Retail Brew.

EE Studio’s kitchen display is filled with smart appliances including a refrigerator with a screen that reveals its contents without opening the door, and from which groceries can be added to shopping lists and ordered using voice commands.

A kid’s bedroom showcases products that are both educational and safeguard them when they’re online, while sets of a living room and home office demonstrate the technological future for those parts of the home.

“You can start to understand what a connected home is,” Bennett said. “What it means, what do I need? How do I build it?”

The gaming section in EE’s London flagship store. 

In another area, shoppers can play video games and, if they need to wind down after all that mayhem, head to the digital spa, an immersive environment that surrounds them with footage and audio of beautiful natural environments.

The digital spa  EE’s London flagship store. 

“Bright lighting, noise and an abundance of visual stimuli can lead to retail exhaustion,” Rachel Lloyd, digital experience director of YourStudio, told Amsterdam-based design publication Frame. ‘“For the EE digital spa, our goal was to provide a moment for shoppers to slow their pace, providing a moment of calm reflection and digitally enabled recharge.”

While the staff in the store assist consumers visiting for a repair or making a purchase, Bennett described them more like brand ambassadors than sales clerks.

“It’s really about falling in love with the products and having a great time and a great experience,” he said.

One indication that EE was thinking counterintuitively about the flagship is that the company decided not to call it a store but rather a studio.

“We did go through some other alternatives for what it could be called as well,” Bennett said. “But we all felt ‘studio’ felt like it was active. You were doing something, you were participating, there was something going on.”

The exterior of EE’s London flagship store. 

UK telecom EE is out to make an impression with its store

EE’s London flagship piles on experiences to show the promise of truly connected homes.

A telecommunications brand’s store is out to make an impression along with a sale

This story is the first installment of our series about the state of store design today.

Walk into the Radio Flyer store, which opened in the Woodfield Mall outside Chicago 

, and it’s one of the first things you notice: parked on a bright green circle of astroturf is one of the brand’s signature red wagons, except this one is much bigger, with wheels the size of a sedan’s.

,” Robert Pasin, who instead of CEO, calls himself the Chief Wagon Officer of the company, told Retail Brew.

Lori Mukoyama, a principal at Gensler who worked on the store’s design, climbed into the cart for a photo she posted to her Instagram account.

“I’m sitting in this huge wagon, but it automatically makes you feel like even as a full-grown adult, I’m kid-sized again,” Mukoyama told Retail Brew.

Gensler store designer Lori Mukoyama sits in a giant Radio Flyer wagon in the Radio Flyer store. 

“It brings the child out in adults,” Pasin said. “They start laughing, they start smiling.”

It’s the first store for Radio Flyer, founded by 

, in 1917. But it’s more than just a milestone. While widespread store closings in recent years gave rise to the term 

 even before Covid-19 made online shopping more ubiquitous, the store may help mark a store-design renaissance.

Stores increasingly are creating elevated experiences where they make not just sales but also memories. Whatever you call it—

—retailers are connecting with consumers more meaningfully than they can through phone screens.

In the Covid era, shoppers have “online shopping fatigue” and “want full-on experience,” Mukoyama said.

The race track inside the Radio Flyer store. 

The Radio Flyer store’s centerpiece is a large track for test-driving its range of products, which includes bikes, scooters, go-karts, and even a kid-sized 

Mukoyama said the track engenders a sense of community inside the store as parents watch their pedaling progeny.

“So I might be there with my 5-year-old and then someone else might be there with their 5-year-old too,” Mukoyama said. “And suddenly we’re chitchatting because our kids are riding their bikes around. So it also is helping bring people back together where it’s your local park or your local coffee shop.”

A young boy rides a tricycle inside the Radio Flyer store. 

Not everyone thought that putting elements of a skate park and playground into a store was a great idea.

“A lot of people were like, ‘Oh, you know, the insurance, the blah, blah, blah,” Pasin said, noting that the store requires parents to sign waivers before their kids don helmets and hit the track. “We’re in the ride-on business because these are vehicles; we’ve got to get people riding them, and they’re very safe.”

A display inside the Radio Flyer store shows three models of kid-sized Tesla electric vehicles..

Any store aspires to be a destination, and for Radio Flyer, it happened in one way they hadn’t planned when someone asked if they could host their kid’s birthday there. The store did its first event recently, giving the birthday kid and their friends the run of the place on a Sunday an hour before the store opened.

“It worked great, and now we’re trying to figure out how we can do it and make it a repeatable thing,” Pasin said. “And hopefully, it can be a little bit of a revenue generator.”

Noticeably absent from the store are any video screens, contrary to some conventional Covid-era wisdom that stores should be more 

 by incorporating more aspects of online shopping that consumers like into their brick-and-mortar stores.

Mukoyama recalled Pasin suggesting that a big digital screen at the store entrance might be a good idea, but she pushed back.

“The energy and the excitement that we heard from [Pasin] didn’t come to life really with a big monitor,” Mukoyama said. “It just replicates everything you’re getting on your phone, right? Why do that again, when I can already get that at my fingertips?”

The store is not far from Radio Flyer’s headquarters in Chicago, and along with other executives, Pasin has spent a lot of time there. He wears a red t-shirt with a little red wagon on it, and a name tag, “Robert,” just like the sales associates, which is exactly what he is to customers, whom he assists and never tells he’s the 

“I’ve had some people…say, ‘That Robert’s really nice,’” he told us. “That’s the best—that makes my day.”

But the real reason he and other executives are there is not to sell wagons, but to see the store in action, and adapt.

“When we’re in the store, we’re wearing a red t-shirt, but we’re really wearing a white lab coat,” Pasin said. “We’ve already reconfigured and moved stuff around based on traffic patterns. I mean, it’s been awesome. It’s been really fun, it’s been really creative, and we’re learning a ton.”

In a gif, a little boy rides in Tesla toy car in Radio Flyer's first store

Inside Radio Flyer’s first store in its 107-year history

The 107-year-old brand highlights how store design can be as much about making a connection as a sale.

Why Radio Flyer just opened its first store…and put a race track in it

The thing about Landini Associates, an Australia-based retail design and brand consultancy, is that it produces work of sublimity in places you least expect them.

 in Sydney Airport’s Terminal 1. It has a second-story kitchen that seems to float above the ordering counter, and an ingenious Rube Goldberg contraption—it’s like a chairlift for Happy Meals—that transports them from the kitchen down to the counter.

Now Landini is at it again, with a head-turning vision for, of all places, the post office.

Australia Post hired Landini in 2022 to help develop and implement a new design for the country’s 4,000-plus post offices. Just a few weeks ago, a prototype of a dramatically different (and retail-oriented) post office was unveiled in Orange, a city in New South Wales with a population of ~44,000. Australia Post Group CEO Paul Graham called it, “the post office for the future.”

It introduces a level of service that may seem otherworldly to Americans, who have bestowed upon the US Postal Service a 

Warning: These four things being piloted at the Orange post office may fill you with jealous rage:

A customer exits the dressing room in Australia Post's newly designed post office in Orange, New South Wales.

 the US (Why can’t we have nice things?), Australia has a vast network of convenient and secure parcel delivery lockers where retailers can deliver packages without fear of 

Down under, Australia Post has helped lead the charge, installing 57,000 parcel lockers, which generally are inside or adjacent to post offices and accessible around the clock.

In FY 2023, Australia Post delivered more than 6 million parcels to its lockers, an increase of 30% over the prior year.

Mark Landini, creative director of Landini Associates, told Retail Brew that because e-commerce returns are so high, particularly with clothing and the custom of bracketing, when shoppers order a size up and down and return two, fitting rooms make sense at the post office because it’s where customers are both receiving and returning online purchases.

“What we were doing in terms of the changing room is to actually provide people with an opportunity to try it on at the point where they’re going to return it, knowing that they are going to return a very high percentage,” Landini told us. 

The retail section, including a small Apple Store, in Australia Post's newly designed post office in Orange, New South Wales.

2. There’s a retail marketplace (with a mini Apple Store)

With so many post offices built in an era when letters and bills proliferated, but which have disappeared in our paperless email era, “they’re left with a lot of space that they don’t have to use but it would make sense that they tried to use [it] in some other way,” Landini explained.

That’s why the Orange post office is now featuring a marketplace. Along with goods from Australian artists and craftspeople, Apple has set up a nook. Landini noted that while Apple doubtless has many customers in Orange, it’s not a big enough market to justify a free-standing Apple Store, so to “have some physical presence there actually makes a lot of sense” for both the brand and consumers.

A customer is helped at a counter in Australia Post's newly designed post office in Orange, New South Wales.

If customers are standing in line looking at the back of someone’s noggin, though, the new offerings just add to the time people were spending at the post office before the redesign.

But at the new post office, customers can scan a QR code, indicate what service they need, and receive a text message when it’s their turn.

The barista and cafe area in Australia Post's newly designed post office in Orange, New South Wales.

Yes, there’s an on-site barista. If you want a perspective about why coffee at the post office is 

 an excellent idea, perhaps you should look somewhere other than a media outlet whose logo is a coffee mug.

A customer enters Australia Post's newly designed post office in Orange, New South Wales.

Four things you’ll envy about Australia’s ‘post office for the future’

Adapted for the e-commerce era, it includes changing rooms, a retail marketplace, and a barista.

There’s Old Navy, the Gap chain founded in 1994 and 

 a now-closed bar in Paris, and then there’s the 

 Navy, founded in 1775 as George Washington was leading the American Revolution effort against the redcoats.

The two may seem to share little in common, besides the fact that one commissions cargo ships and the other is an 

 of cargo shorts. But something else binds them: They’re both in the retail business.

The Navy operates more than 300 Navy Exchange (NEX) retail stores on 92 naval bases worldwide, ranging from self-checkout 

 as small as 200 square feet to sprawling department stores that are 200,000 square feet.

, with an operating profit of $39.2 million, much of which ($29.2 million) went back to support the Navy community through its Morale, Welfare, and Recreation programs.

Active-duty, retirees, and their families are among those 

 to shop at the stores. The draw for shoppers (the Navy prefers “patrons”), along with the convenience of being on-base, is that there’s no sales tax, and beyond the tax savings, NEX claims, prices on average are more than 20% lower than at other stores.

But Rich Honiball, EVP and global chief merchandising and marketing officer for the Navy Exchange Service Command (NEXCOM), which oversees NEX, said the stores can’t thrive on those attributes alone.

“Thirty years ago, it was really convenient because everybody lived on base,” but now “more families…live off base,” Honiball told Retail Brew. So today, “it’s about creating a sense of excitement, a sense of community, a sense of belonging, [and] being able to allow patrons to check more off their list.”

NEX tapped The Lionesque Group, part of MG2, in 2020 to redesign its Oceana base store in Virginia Beach, Virginia, department by department. As you’d expect from the armed forces, the redesigns are being battle-tested in the Oceana store, and deployed in Navy stores around the globe. 

The remodeled beauty department in the Navy's Oceana NEX store. 

 For Melissa Gonzalez, an MG2 principal and founder of The Lionesque Group, that means helping to create something that would encourage driving past Targets and Best Buys to shop on-base.

When first visiting the Oceana store, Gonzalez occasionally encountered products stacked “up to the ceiling,” she said, which seemed strictly “functional: How much product can we get on the floor that can be bought by somebody at the cheapest price?”

So working with Honiball, she set about to zhuzh it up

“The mindset,” Gonzalez told Retail Brew, is, “‘Let’s not think of ourselves as the military store; let’s think of ourselves as a retail destination.’”

One of the first departments that Gonzalez and her firm tackled was beauty and, fittingly, it got a makeover.

The products had been arranged by brand but were rearranged by regimen instead.

New end caps feature educational tips and how-tos.

A flexible space in the new beauty department hosts special events and live streaming.

The beauty department redesign was introduced in the Oceana store in 2022 and in the store on the Pensacola Navy base in Florida earlier this year. Honiball said the post-redesign sales bumps have been dramatic:

Sales in the Oceana beauty department increased over 10% YTD over the same time frame last year; in Pensacola, where it was remodeled early this year, sales increased 6% over the past year.

Sales for Oceana’s redesigned essentials department (includes personal care, health care, household supplies, pet, and baby) are up almost 20% YTD over last year.

“The way that the departments are structured and organized elevates the product, elevates the experience, and makes it easier for the customer to find what they’re looking for,” Honiball said.

Lionesque redesigns the Oceana NEX store section by section, Gonzalez said some elements carry over from department to department, including fixtures that are modular, enabling the stores to easily reconfigure displays, as well as redesigning signage.

She also said rather than trying to cram more merchandise onto the floor, they dedicated more space for “storytelling.” With hair dryers, for example, the store took an aspect of online shopping that shoppers appreciate—being able to click a few products and see how they compare side-by-side—and recreated it IRL.

“This is what this blower does versus this one versus that one,” Gonzalez explained. “So you kind of can do comparative shopping while standing in the aisle just like you would do online.”

Honiball said the redesign is consistently improving sales across departments, both in the Oceana store and in other stores where they’re introduced.

“I am absolutely blown away,” he said. “Some of it is kind of Retail 101, but you don’t have a 1,600 or 1,800 

 increase without a significant part of it being a redesign and a rethinking of the store.”

A woman wearing a camo uniform sprays a perfume sample on her wrist. 

Store Design

Hot Topic: More than 8 out of 10 say locked display cases not a solution for shoplifting

Two in three shoppers won’t buy products in locked display cases

Why Snarkitecture builds artistic ‘interventions’ in retail stores

A telecommunications brand’s store is out to make an impression along with a sale

Why Radio Flyer just opened its first store…and put a race track in it

Four things you’ll envy about Australia’s ‘post office for the future’

How the US Navy is redesigning its 300+ retail stores on bases worldwide

Retail news that keeps industry pros in the know