Several brands have drawn inspiration from beloved familiar formats such as corner shops, bike stores and bodegas – using the nostalgia-laced cues of retro styling to reinforce their long-held role as true heartlands of local shopkeeping. All announce product launches, innovative collections, or herald a new season – and serve as love letters to sports or travel.

Quickfire customisation and sampling culture is flourishing this quarter via an exciting redefinition of the vending machine format. Luxury fashion labels, beauty brands and sports players are fuelling the trend.

Elsewhere, a wave of joy-leaning store designs (see Joytopias: Playable Retail Destinations in Brand Spaces: 8 Trends & Opportunities, 25/26) plunge visitors into spaces saturated with vivid colour or the vibrancy of hue-clashing in the extreme. These high-energy retail zones create immersive experiences that, in some cases, are a nod to mind-expanding scenarios.

Other new openings present adventure-primed escape from urban epicentres, repopulating amid the post-pandemic return to offices. Treatments including in-store sports courts, skate bowls (the skateboarding sector is projected to hit $4.25bn by 2030 – Grand View Research, add year report was published here) and creativity-tracking technologies emphasise the sense of new frontiers. 

Forward-thinking brands continue to embrace literary culture. Aligning with the growth of physical book sales (a predicted CAGR of 0.20% from 2025-29, reaching $70.75bn – Statista, 2025) and the 67% of Americans who long for the pre-‘plugged in’ era, trends range from bibliophilic-inspired VM to in-store libraries and unorthodox bookstore concepts.

Astute beauty, fashion and footwear brands with an international footprint are honouring the growing urge to localise by digging further into destination-referencing flagships and concept stores. Anchored in materiality, some include a nod to the blended histories, external influences and/or pop-cultural references that have shaped a city’s cultural DNA.   

Showcasing their intellectual and artistic affinities, pop-culturally-attuned fashion, beauty and accessories brands in this quarter’s round-up are experimenting with design references alluding to cinema or theatre (in one instance even adding a small-scale cinema). The heightened storytelling-based stimulation of many of these spaces also includes a sense of transition between lives lived publicly and privately.

The well-worn trend for grandly industrialised retail spaces (see Epic Industrial in our Global Store Openings Design Trends Round-Up: June 2024 and Brutalist Biophilia in Global Store Openings: March 2024) is evolving this quarter. Styling departs from classic warehousing and instead welcomes an old-meets-new look, or incorporates the frisson of interactive art.

An accelerated desire to combat the beauty industry’s sales slowdown is fuelling fresh concepts capable of talking to fan bases in new ways. These include self-care-centring store design foregrounding more holistic experiences (i.e. beauty-meets-meditation), revamps of the beauty labs trend (see The Serious Business of Science-Backed Style & Beauty in Global Store Openings Design Trends: December 2024), and craft-infused interiors.