Fans Assemble: Spaces for Pause, Transition & Connection

Countering ‘social recession’ (see Cultivating Connection in our Look Ahead 2025), several brands – including retail behemoths not typically renowned for a slowed pace or cultivating kinship – have incubated spaces fostering casual micro connections. Sometimes extending/echoing neighbourhood activity and cultural energy, they eschew events-only ‘dead spaces’ in favour of spontaneous programming and spaces to socially recharge.

Care Culture, Elevated: Aftercare, Refurbs & Embellishment

Several fashion and luggage brands have elevated ‘care culture’-based concepts this season. These imaginative spaces offer repair and refurbishment alongside personalisation services that rethink traditional consumption and support the creation of longer-term brand-fan connections. From a ‘cashmere spa’ to an ‘Archive of Dreams’, the best trade on amplifying desire.

Golden Age Design: Evolving & Remixing Vintage

Channelling the continued appetite for nostalgia fuelled by yearning for the ‘unplugged era’ (see Retro Gaming and Nurturing Nostalgia in Ad Age 2025), multiple brands evolved vintage aesthetics with sensibilities straddling opulent, humble and artisanal. Some reference fictional characters to add mystique; the best avoid clichéd theatricality for subtly intriguing journeys into the past.

Trippy Shopping: The Hallucinogenic Flagship

Brands from sectors as diverse as fashion, cannabis and toys have borrowed the irreverent, surreal, sometimes illusory cues of gaming and internet culture (see Humour Now: #Dreamcore, Daily Deadpan & Unhinged TikTok in our Ad Age 2025 coverage) and the mainstreaming of the psychedelic renaissance to create overtly escapist environments.

Luxury Motherships: Multiple Worlds in One

Luxury brands continue to craft awe-inducing mega flagships to showcase the majesty of their universes (see Luxury’s New Motherships in our Summer 2023 Global Store Openings report). Some echo real-world settings while others present luxurious brand homes with cinemas, gourmet dining experiences, music rooms and art spaces.

Parenting Plus: Redefining Family-Foregrounding Retail

Other brands have focused on premiumising spaces connected to the rising spend on toys, babies and post-partum products and services (see The Pulse of Parenthood: Retail Trends & Opportunities). These retail concepts support informed decision-making, offer hands-on product testing, and/or address practical in-store needs like nursing rooms.

Grab-&-Go Styling Serves Convenience Culture Kudos

Two imaginative food and beauty brands have unveiled store spaces anchored in the pleasure of self-service design, toying with the conventional codes of convenience store grab-and-go concepts.

The Generative Space

Tipping a nod to the rise in responsive technologies, particularly generative AI (whether the tech is involved or not), is the slow influx of spaces that respond to the inhabitant. The best are more than interactive – instead focusing on fresh, real-time creation to cultivate the thrill of a space in flux.

Temples to Pro-Aspiring Performance

Several performance-focused sports brands, for whom a high level of athletic product prowess is the critical selling factor, have upped their ante on product testing or technology-demonstrating environments. What sets these spaces apart from their predecessors is their precision in targeting specific training styles or event types, moving beyond testing methods like basic gait analysis.

Ultra-Craft & Subversive Artisanship

Other openings have taken craftsmanship to extraordinary architectural and interior design heights – elevating the crafting process itself via extraordinary material use, intricate detailing, and sometimes exaggerated forms to create visually stunning environments.