Phygital Engagement & Bio-Smart Spaces

Shoppers’ migration to digital during lockdown has spot-lit the urgent need for brands to onboard better omni-channel or inspirational tech-enhanced store design. Pop-ups using AR, cutting-edge sensors and biometric tech capable of personalising and adding delight to the consumer experience talk to this shift – and the physical space as an interactive brand interface.

Life in Collaborative Context

As in Strategies for Selling Tech, there’s still major mileage in using pop-ups to add a contextualising backdrop to products hard to explain, or get people excited by, within the physical constraints of most flagships. The best play to their locality and/or feed on uniting consumer clans (from wannabe actors to gamer kids), often in partnership with other brands. 

Gateways, Outreach & Clan Spaces

Covid-19 has also accelerated the appreciation of initiatives honouring locality and community. Whether supporting solidarity with local retail heroes, fandoms or consumers’ reticence to travel into urban epicentres, it’s propelling the value of pop-ups that take big brands deep into peripheral consumer heartlands, with stores acting as clan hubs and service design cognisant of localised desires.

Sensorial Kicks & Performance Spaces

A new breed of sensorially-amplified, performance-driven pop up spaces are doing double duty – as micro entertainment hotspots that also serve to humanise brands at-large. Grounded in intriguing idiosyncrasies and escapism, most are bookable experiences – a trend set to boom post-lockdown (see Resetting Physical Retail).

Fashion’s Fluid Moments

2020 has already witnessed seismic shifts in the fashion industry as long-standing Fashion Weeks across the globe shift into digital formats, merging gated (industry only) presentations with consumer-facing content and events. It’s a move toward greater fluidity and seasonless strategies perfectly aligned to a pop-up mentality.

Pop-Ups Prop up a New Urbanity

The pandemic is likely to reshape the fabric of urban spaces, from the introduction/ normalisation of more pedestrianised zones and kerbside collection points to landlords exercising shorter term leases. Such changes are laying a path for transitory, concentrated spatial designs in sync with a more flexible, agile city environment.