Retail Will Be Revolutionized
How experiential design can save brick-and-mortar retail
I have a confession to make: I miss shopping. And I’m not talking about opening my laptop and ordering fifteen brand new things that I definitely don’t need, I’m talking about capital “S” shopping. The kind we used to do at the mall back in the day… the kind that’s dying at an alarming rate. The kind that we can save with a few clever ideas.
But first, the confession. Here’s what I miss:
I miss standing at the entrance of the mall as my mom pulled away, shouting out the window that she’ll see me in two hours and to not be late. I miss seeing my friends as the automated doors open and the A.C. hits my cheeks, the boys and girls somehow standing both too far apart and too close at the same time. I miss squeezing in between the older kids with their giant Jansport backpacks at the Tower Records, to grab my copy of the much anticipated new R.E.M album. I miss the free samples at Auntie Anne’s and the teeth-aching sweetness of an Orange Julius. I’d knit a thousand pandemic-socks if it meant I could just be back in the mall of my youth, sipping a too-sweet drink and sneaking into Brookstones to catch 15 minutes on the massage chair before some bored 20-something salesman kicks me out.
And look: I get it, the peeling plastic tables of malldom should not spark this level of inspiration.
But it does. For me and probably a few others who happen to be reading this.
That’s because the mall was the one place we felt free — free of parents and teachers, chores and homework, questions of what we were doing and who we were seeing. For a few hours after school, we could just be, in the comfort and excitement of the mall.
It was in a Claire’s, running my fingers across silver cartilage earrings, where I first felt the tingle of rebellion. It was in the junior’s department at Filene’s where I realized that maybe I didn’t have to dress like all my friends. It was in the B. Dalton Bookstore where I had my first real fight with my first real boyfriend and afterwards, sank down in a too-small beanbag, Roxette’s Listen to Your Heart playing on the intercom, gently comforting my angst-filled and broken tween heart.
Aside from being the site of my pre-teen epiphanies, the mall was also just plain convenient. I could do all of my “errands” there — cash my Bat Mitzvah checks, sneak into an R-rated horror movie for my first kiss, or walk into an ACTUAL recording studio with a gaggle of girlfriends to record — on a cassette — The Beach Boys classic hit, Kokomo. The mall of my youth had everything I could possibly want. And that’s exactly what the mall was designed for.
Malls were invented in the 1950s by an architect who wanted to recreate the feeling of European plazas in American suburbia. Suburbs were sprawling and isolating, with no social or economic center. The mall was the answer: under a single roof, you could buy anything you needed and find connection to your community.
And it worked. Between 1965 to 2005, 1,500 malls were built, filled with glittering window displays and airy public spaces that invited couples, families, and teenagers alike. In the late ’80s and early 90s, at the height of my mall-going days, malls accounted for over 50% of retail dollars spent. And malls became cultural touchstones, a place to see and be seen, as Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Clueless have shown.
But today, malls are under attack from two fronts. They’re no longer the center for social connection or efficient shopping. E-commerce is frictionless and ruthlessly efficient and offers way more inventory than its IRL counterparts, from toilet paper to boutique bourbon — you know, all the pandemic essentials.
As for connection and experience? That is beat by….pretty much everything else. Travel, immersive exhibits, even video games — the technology and accessibility of nearly every other experience has improved exponentially, while the experience of brick-and-mortar shopping has pretty much remained stuck in the ‘90s.
Covid-19 made things worse for malls and all brick-and-mortar retail, forcing more than 8,300 stores to close in the first half of 2020, but the devastation we’re seeing started long before the pandemic. Over the last decade, e-commerce has grown steadily, while retail revenues have fallen. Every time I take my dog for a walk, I walk past shuttered storefronts, seeing the decline happen in real time.
So where does that leave us? If physical retail no longer provides convenience or worthwhile experiences, does it have a place at all?
If retail is to survive, it has to confront both attacks. It can’t simply move online. As the CEO of a spatial storytelling agency, I understand that digital tools are powerful and necessary. But I also know, from decades of experience in the industry and a super-compressed year of forced digitalization, that “virtual” is not enough. It’s 2-dimensional and isolating, which is the last thing any of us want to feel after being shrunk down to pixelated bobble heads on tiny Zoom screens.
If this year showed us anything, convenience and efficiency can’t solve everything. We desperately want more. We want an experience.
Millennials agree. 78 percent say they would choose experiences over material goods. And in response, some malls have taken “experience” to extreme measures. Triple Five Group built indoor ski slopes, water parks, and aquariums to entice customers through their doors. And others have turned their stores into flagships like the Apple store — selling membership in a cool club as much as they’re selling a product. It’s all pretty impressive, but it’s no more than a fancy version of the ’80s mall carousel with more bells and whistles, and an occasional VR headset.
In order to compete with the demands of e-commerce, retail needs to align the immersive power of physical spaces with the convenience and connectivity of digital. With new tools and new ways of thinking, we can reignite the discovery and inspiration we once felt at our local mall.
Retail has long needed an overhaul. And now is the time.
The Store of the Future
Imagine yourself in a gallery. It looks like an art gallery, feels like an art gallery, but the displays aren’t of art, at least not in the traditional sense. They’re clothes, beautifully staged and thoughtfully curated.
Each display has one or two items — no clutter, no distractions, no wading through mounds of clothing to find your size and color.
Your Own Personal Shopper
You step up to a red coat that catches your eye, you reach out and hold the fabric between your fingers, imagining how it will look over your new little black dress. You scan it with your phone, choose your size and color, read reviews, and see photographs of how others have worn it.
Once you’ve made your selection, an AI personal stylist pops up and recommends complementary items that, as if by magic, are better than what you would have chosen for yourself.
How could you say no to those studded, black booties?
A Smarter Mirror
When you’re ready to try on your items, a prompt pops up: would you like a virtual try on, or would you prefer to have your items brought to your dressing room? Maybe you select “virtual try on” because the idea of undressing and dressing and undressing and dressing is still more than you can handle these days.
You drift towards the fitting room with the AR-enabled mirror for a touchless try-on. Your personal device, with all your sizes and preferences stored, automatically connects to the smart dressing room. With a swipe, you see yourself in that sharp black coat with those perfect booties.
Wave your hand, and your next outfit appears. Not sure which one you like better? Wave again to bring back the first outfit and compare both side-by-side. Need a second opinion? You can video chat your bestie to make sure it will work for that big, upcoming presentation.
No Lines, No Waiting
When you’re ready to purchase your items, just hit checkout on your phone. No need to get in line; the cash register is gone.
In the back of the store, your items are arranged in a cute reusable tote that’s waiting for you to walk out into the street, surveying the other shops to continue your retail-therapy adventure.
Immersive Storytelling
And this isn’t just for booties and bags — every shopping experience can be reimagined. Need a new tent, since Covid has made campers out of all of us? Walk into your fave outdoor retailer and enter a simulator where you can browse a selection of tents, modifying the temperatures and changing the scenery to better inform your purchase.
Or spark your wanderlust in an immersive storytelling experience that takes you to the most remote mountain ranges or sun-soaked coast lines through stunning visuals and rich narrative audio. All in the service of making your tent-shopping experience better.
At Home Experiences
This isn’t just cool tech for the sake of cool tech. The future of retail will be in how brands create seamless guest journeys that marry the efficiency of e-commerce with the sensory experience of IRL shopping.
If you want to continue browsing other outfits at home, you can harness the power of AI and 3D modeling, right from your phone. The tech lays the foundation for an ongoing conversation, one that you can resume the next time you’re in the store or while you’re on the couch binging Netflix.
E-commerce isn’t going anywhere, so embedding smarter digital touchpoints into physical environments means that you can have the retail experience you want, wherever and whenever you want it.
From Transactional to Transformational
The mall of my childhood may be gone, but our desires for autonomy, experience, and discovery aren’t. They’re louder than ever.
When it comes to rebuilding retail, we need to create holistic and immersive brand experiences that unify e-commerce with brick-and-mortar. We need to let consumers touch the fabric, see themselves in the product, and imagine where it might take them, all while building smart technology that will simplify and amplify the shopping experience. We need to highlight the tactileness of IRL and accentuate it with smart digital tools — moving retail relationships from transactional to transformative.
And in doing this we can not only save retail, we can revolutionize it. Perhaps this is just the Orange Julius-flavored dream of a mall rat turned CEO, but I believe we can make it happen —
One studded pair of booties at a time.
If you enjoyed this piece, sign up for our newsletter. This is the first installment of The Futurity Series by Faculty, our exploration of taking what we’ve learned from the past to create what’s next for our collective future. Also, if you want to experience the mall of my youth (and how can you not?), I present to you the 1984 Crossgates Mall promo
