Luxury Ski-Tailing: Slope Side Pop-Ups

Tapping the rising desire for services, device and guidance surrounding physical recovery detailed in Monetising Marathon Culture, German footwear brand Birkenstock’s chalet pop-up at the French ski resort Les Deux Alpes centres on recuperation. 

Styled with mid-century minimalist interior design, the residential-looking space hosts a foot spa and massages, yoga, and a demonstration of the cork-latex footbed technology on which Birkenstock’s orthopaedic credentials rest. There is also a laser customisation service and winter product edit, including the brand’s premium shearling line.

Riffing on an elite brand design genre, based on cinematic grade scenography – see Experiential Exhibitionism: Immersive Marketing Moves in Global Store Openings Design Trends Round-Up, Vol. 3, 2025 – luxury multi-brand German fashion e-tailer Mytheresa’s Maison Mytheresa has opened a hotel-inspired pop-up in St Moritz, Switzerland.

Playfully enigmatic in its cinematic styling, it visually echoes the pastel-saturated, meticulously symmetrical, always sumptuous worlds of US film director Wes Anderson – think red velvet curtains, tasselled room keys, cabinets of curiosities (new season collections), and bellboys in pillbox hats and white globes. It was designed by UK agency Studio Boum.

Hitching the ski boom to Lunar New Year Celebrations (and commerce, see our 2025 report), Burberry’s youth-targeting pop-up in Chongli, China foregrounds the brand’s Year of the Horse collection and largely centres locality-specific reboots of brand motifs, including a ski lift wrapped in Burberry’s signature check print and a redesign of a 1930s clock from its London flagship. The focus on China makes sense – Chinese Gen Z are credited with fuelling Burberry’s recent sales boost.