1. AI-Uplifted Stores: Self-Service + Creatively Superlative

Generative artificial intelligence (see our Macro series Life in AI) will underscore both emotionally transportive and persuasively pragmatic store-side opportunities in 2025/26, including satisfying the 67% globally who prefer self-service (Tidio, 2024). Whether it’s marrying diagnostics with custom product creation, visualising (inventory-relatable) dreams or creating direct lines to brand idols, dial up omnichannel-blending AI-enhanced experiences.

2. Bibliophilic Brands: Spaces for Holding Space

Chiming with the growth of physical book sales (see Key Stats), bibliophilic brand haunts also promise wins. Their capacity to add intimacy, cultural context, intellectual gravitas and/or hold space for critical social discourse offers credibility and, in some cases, may alleviate unease with hyper-consumption (see Look Ahead 2025: Retail & Brand Comms). 

3. Joytopias: Playable Retail Destinations

Expect the joyconomy to boom in 2025/26. Countering ever-bleaker news cycles and a maelstrom of modern stressors, look to ‘playable’ brand spaces that plug a paucity of public resources, spark/strengthen community connections, and/or serve the stress-evading, healing-connected and often nostalgia-tinged mentality of ‘kidulting’. Connecting play and product is key for creating lasting affinity. 

4. Fanships & Aficionado Attractions

Building on section 5, Stan Stores: Servicing the Obsession Overspill in Brand Spaces: 2024/25, destinations sensitively servicing music, TV, film and internet culture fandoms stand to win big. Fan-tailing magnified, consider this genre a beguiling blend of tour spin-off venues, fan clubs and homage hubs; archive components and access to rarities or ‘re-editions’ (product or content) will be key.

5. Rescue Rooms: Stress-Relief & Performance-Boosts

Evolving strategies in Retail Therapy Hubs in Brand Spaces, 24/25, therapeutic concepts showcasing salves for stressors – from parenthood to financial anxiety – or improving performance (mental, physical, cognitive) will soar in value. Cued into resilience and mood-boosting for ‘better living’, multisensory design and fresh breeds of retail expertise will underpin successful approaches. 

6. Empathy Exchanges: Cause-Driven Concept Stores

While consumers’ affinity with overtly politicised brands is waning (see Key Stas), divisive and destabilising times will valorise those which support consumer-level sociopolitical discourse (also see Key Stats). From rage rooms and feminist-fuelled pop-ups to the recalibration of charity shopping, we highlight inspirational early movers.

7. Immersion Suites: Sensory Manipulation

For 2025/26, also expect new multisensory technologies – often combined with crafted blends of immersive theatrics – to amplify truly transportive and compelling in-store storytelling. From sensory stimulation to environmental replication, straddling colour perception, sonic branding and next-level tactility, these concepts posit the physical brand space as a powerhouse of ‘emotioneering’.

8. Custom Culture: Residencies, Salon Stores & Hobby Houses

Inventive iterations of customisation and hobbyist culture will foreground consumers’ artistic agency in 2025/26, channelling their desire to be considered creative, the appeal of personalised goods, stress relief (see section 3, Joytopias), and the rise of collector culture (see Key Stats for all). The best promote a shared proximity to creative culture and experts.