Theater of Retail

About:

Now, there is a new way to build a store. This is the Year of Innovation, where we are expanding beyond the boundaries of traditional store design by blending creativity with design and technology. Now, we’re building from lay down the ‘interaction infrastructure’ along with mechanical architecture.

On November 5th, The Science Project debuted the Perry Ellis Store of the Future, an immersive-technology driven retail store located within Macy's Herald Square new Men’s Wing. A retail industry first, this brand-driven shopping destination was conceived, designed and developed by us using digital technology and tools built on our ShopStage technology platform, all designed to captivate the modern shopper and tell the Perry Ellis brand story. This flexible, interactive platform extends the Perry Ellis story beyond the retail store, connecting the dots from the Macy’s Shop to a “Very Perry” world.

The Science Project worked with Architecture Design Firm Sawicki Tarella to co-develop the digital and physical store concepts, resulting in this industry-first retail collaboration featuring a series of surprising moments that encourage shoppers to discover and interact with the Perry Ellis brand in unexpected ways. The store features first-of-its-kind reactive retail technology -- from a panel of 3 curved and stacked LED screens and embedded lighting to an interactive Floating Mirror situated near the fitting room featuring a series of “Very Perry” branded dialog and quotes. Additional design elements, such as herringbone floors, embedded fixtures and artful merchandise displays true to the Perry Ellis brand bring fresh and engaging brand moments.

From concept to creation, design to management, this ambitious project was built by a modern brand for the most modern of customer.

For this prestigious fashion technology conference, we designed and built the entire Bytes and Bricks interactive experience. This installation was designed to both enchant and exhibit the newest cutting edge technology.

UNIQLO asked The Science Project for an approach that places mobile into a larger strategy that can increase the brand’s reach, revenue opportunities and transparency of in-store behavior.

Inside their three floor, 60,000-square-foot store, shoppers are taken on an immersive, mobile journey from the moment they enter the store to the point of purchase.

With our integrated mobile experience, customers can explore the store like a pro. Going to a party and need a dress? No need to fret! By going on UNIQLO Chicago’s website, shoppers can use the StyleFinder to answer a couple of fun questions to find the perfect night look, personalized just for you. They can also browse daily promotions, view the store map, and earn instant in-store savings!

Bonobos has always fascinated us. An apparent inverse the traditional model of physical-first retail, Bonobos is an ecommerce retailer that utilizes physical “Guideshops” in order to provide customers with the option of understanding the different fits of their suits, shirting, casualwear and signature chinos. That being said, Bonobos maintains its status as exclusively ecommerce because customers can’t buy the merchandise in store. Here’s a list of the factors that we find important:

1. Storytelling

The store name Bonobos originated from a species of apes, whom are the most evolved apes on the planet. You may think, what does an ape and a retail store have in common? Bonobos the brand wanted to build a menswear brand for the most evolved men on planet earth. On social media, they maintain a very casual, down-to-earth and environmentally friendly persona, which is fitting for the nature of the brand.

2. Store Drivers

Searching Bobonos with mobile is a seamless experience. The SEO localization was able to pick up the nearest stores, along with a link to enter their GuideShops site and an embedded map with the nearest locations, all within two scrolls on my mobile. Their website has a clear, functional, and simple UI. Within minutes, I was able to set up an appointment at the Flatiron location for later in the day. The only drawback was that Bonobos didn’t offer me suggestions or alternatives based on my selections.

3. Luring Passersby

Located in the heart of Manhattan, the Flatiron location is hard to miss. Bonobos kept the facade of the store aligned with the branding of the website, and the product-forward presentation of the window display gave me a good idea of what the brand has to offer. Great CTA in the window display, which coaxed me into the store.

4. Associate Communication & Customer Journey

Perhaps one of the most personalized shopping experience I have ever had. The associate or “guide,” was friendly, knowledgeable and pleasantly helpful. The only downfall was lack of inventory on a few items due to the difficulty in coordinating availability with a warehouse (no items are actually up for sale in the store itself!

5.Ease of transaction

You can place your order right from the store, and they also offer a discount off your first order! Not only do I have the (almost) instant satisfaction of receiving the product one day after purchasing it, but I also got to try it on, and most importantly, I didn’t have to schlep it home.

6. Post-shopping

Not only did I leave with a cart full of items, ready to be reviewed and potentially purchased at my earliest convenience, but I also received a personalized email from the associate, specifying items I expressed interest in, yet decided not to put in my cart. Very helpful, and very sincere.

Overall Satisfaction

This term has challenged retail businesses for years with its simple cut and dry value metric 'forever;'

It is $x / sqft to build it, $y/ sqft to operate it.  We expect it to generate $z/ sqft to be a success.

This formula has quite an intimidating reputation, and cornered it can be very dangerous.  But its strength is finite.

Lets be honest, 'The Square Foot' is quite limited.

Our tools have evolved though.   Digitally we can now; extend its reach, expand beyond it, engage outside it and connect it past borders and lease lines.

We are now Transforming the entire practice.  Creating a contiguous shopping landscape.

There are ever increasing options for tactics; Drive to store, book associate appointments, create deep brand moments and more...

Take for instance how we can create value before a store opens, creating conversation, excitement, and intent.

A brand can now stretch lease lines, communicating with shoppers in proximal locations, broadening their footprint and inviting them into our ‘Story’ even before they are in our ‘Store.’

Once inside we can expand brand and product, shopping an entire breadth of inventory from small flexible footprints.  

The Square Foot can and will be irrelevant soon enough with brands and retailers interacting with customers everywhere.

Still to beat and ultimately 'Break the Square Foot'  we need to excel 'end to end.'

...and we need to do it together!

That now means bringing tactics together into a cohesive team and plan; from brand, technology, operations and enterprise.

We can all come together to defeat our common foe and ...

"Break the Square Foot".

We present to you a modern set of flexible criteria:

1. Storytelling

From first introduction to a brand, to falling in love with a product, to becoming a long time loyal customer.  We look at the consistency of platform storytelling across touch points.

2. Store Drivers

From search listings to store locator.  How well is the brand’s site designed to accommodate the modern Customer Journey not only on desktop but most importantly on Mobile? How does the brand influence me to want to go into the store?  Does it drive intent, appointments, phone calls?

3. Luring passersby

How did the brand attract me into the store?

4. Associate communication & Customer Journey

How was I introduced to the brand and the shopping experience? How was I guided through the experience? How often were recommendations made based on my selections? How did the layout and design of the shopping space influence my journey

5. Ease of transaction

How simple was the checkout process?

6. Post-shopping

(How) did the brand keep in touch with me after I left the store?

We are pleased to announce that our Kate Spade Shoppable Barricade has won first place in the Visual Merchandising and Store Design (VMSD) International Visual Competition!

The reimagined construction barriers continue to gain industry recognition for The Science Project and kate spade new york. And thanks to the success of our first two shoppable barricades, kate spade new york and The Science Project are pleased to introduce a new interactive barricade at Simon’s Roosevelt Field Mall.  

Launching this week, the barricade is located in front of the future kate spade new york store set to open on September 1st. The barricade features a captivating mix of imagery and touch screens that provide custom product recommendations, and targeted sights to see, books to read, and music to listen to - all based on the shoppers’ own “New York persona.”  Shoppers are then sent tailored recommendations via email and can shop their custom options on katespade.com (with 2 day shipping).  

We couldn’t have said it better ourselves but, here’s what VMSD Competition judge Brindley had to say about the barricade, “It’s not just a dead façade. You’re building a brand ambassador before you’ve even opened the store.”

When we set out to innovate shopping experiences in physical spaces, we began in the digital realm. We’ve since expanded our thinking to unify the digital, physical, and behavioral disciplines, finely tuned to understand what creates great brands, valuable customers and a viable retail platform.

It’s an honor to be acknowledged by some of the masters in retail. We believe every shop – regardless of its square footage – is a stage and this award is a testament to our truly transformative work and the inventive experiences we create for visionary clients like kate spade new york.

This month we also saw the beginning of the rollout of our work with Calvin Klein in their Woodbury Commons New Jersey outlet, a location welcoming millions of guests each year. Through wayfinding, digital signage and branding, guests from all over the world are greeted in nine different languages.  Together, The Science Project and Calvin Klein reimagined the greeting process and this project definitely scores some major points for creating an inventive first impression.

In addition, this month we are incredibly proud to announce our partnership with Perry Ellis, whose innovative and energetic styles have been reinvigorating menswear for decades. With this vision in hand, The Science Project has been busy working with the Perry Ellis team and Macy’s on a project that will redefine the shop of the future, coming this fall!

2. My first wearable™.

This is my first wearable. And probably my last. And that’s because it’s pretty damn good. Why would I use any other wearable exactly? I fear for the Fitbits of the world — the Apple Watch won’t send them immediately to the purgatory of Flip Cameras but fully popularizing the category might. As many have noted, Apple didn’t invent the categories it owns — in fact it didn’t invent any of them, from the user-friendly GUI to the iPad or the Apple Watch. Early critics of the iPod wondered aloud why we would need any successor to Sony’s MP3 players (then the heir apparents to the category-creating Walkman). As a long-time Blackberry lover I, like many, didn’t get an iPhone until many years after iPhone launch. Given time I’m certain the Apple Watch will be viewed the same way: category-creating best-of-class.

3. A tsunami of little victories.

My phone is perfectly capable of many things, yet these little actions were also fun and unusually satisfying on the watch:

• Answering a call! • Accepting a meeting request! • Discreetly viewing incoming messages! • Calendar alerts! • Timing dinner! • Sports scores! • Amazon voice search! • (Hate to say it but) Ubering! • Mapping my run!

All handled with phone in pocket or in some other room. And I can honestly say that in not going to the phone for these events I was thoroughly less distracted from what I was doing at the time. When was the last time you opened a browser and went to just one site? Or went to your phone and touched just one app?

4. A tide pool of defeats.

There’s not too much that I flat out don’t like about the Apple Watch and, by and large, the pros outweigh the cons IMHO. (If you’re looking for a haters piece I assume you’ve stopped reading already.) To be honest it’s a much, much better first generation Apple product than I expected — hardware and software both. But the niggling things? Yeah I’ve got a few complaints:

• The app load times are a bit absurd. It’s not unusual to wait 4+ seconds or more for apps to load or load data. I get it: it’s tethered to the phone and bluetooth is bluetooth, but this is, I would say, the primary gap between the watch and the phone experience. • I admit it: I had to Google a few instructions, like how to change the watch face. Yeah, Apple included a very nicely designed quick start guide that I totally ignored. Also still not sure how to draw the heart and send it either… • Like many iPhone users, I love Apple hardware with Google software. On the watch in particular this means bending to Apple Maps instead of Waze or Google Maps, which is a shame. I assume the Google Apps will come and, thankfully, Outlook (by far the best iPhone email client) works perfectly on the watch.

5. The haptics are intimate.

Truly. They are. No bing, no buzz. Little vibrations. Only you know. I don’t understand the language they’re speaking yet, but in time I’ll learn. I’m sort of trying not to research what they mean and just learn by listening or, rather, feel. The meaning: it’s a very, very personal device. Nobody else can see the face. It only reveals its knowledge to the owner. And after 5 days I’m beginning to learn the secret language. Like!

6. The art of the notification.

One of the first things you must complete during set-up is to choose which apps will send notifications to the watch. First, it’s genius that Apple made this a part of the set-up process. It would’ve been very easy to not do this and simply assume that all notifications on phone would be mirrored on watch. And that would’ve been a grave error. Given the intimacy of the notifications, you must choose. I believe the intimacy of the watch will sharpen users’ senses about notifications, which will in turn require developers to be more conscious of them and, ideally, offer more granular options.

They’d be wise to to look to sports apps, which already do this very well. For a single hockey game The Score allows me to choose specific notifications for any or all of these events: game start, game end, period end, close game, all power plays and all goals. It also remembers my selections from previous games. And that’s just the beginning of how users can customize notifications in The Score. Sports fans — many of whom are DVRing events for viewing later — require this control and the developers have delivered. The art of the notification will need to be learned more widely.

7. Context is king.

Woe be unto the brand that abuses watch notifications! I’m fairly forgiving of irrelevant messaging on my phone, but I won’t enjoy it on the watch. Not one bit. Ergo, people will curate their notifications more carefully and brands will be responsible for ensuring their messages are more contextually relevant than ever before. With the app mentioned above, I have to make very conscious choices for which notifications I want to receive. That’s messaging 1.0. Messaging 2.0 will need to be smarter — basing messaging on my place, time, habits and other learned data.

Fortunately there are emerging technologies to enable this evolution — among them beacons and other proximity and shopper marketing tools, as well as advanced CRM technology — all designed to do what marketing has always done: right place, right time, right message. If you want to play on wearables, you better get all three of those right, and then some.

8. A humble beginning.

Most of the apps are not all that impressive…yet. It feels like the first wave of apps were created by brands/designers/developers who a) wanted to get their Apple Watch app out in the first wave, to say that they did, and b) did not have a device in their hands. Simply put — I’m not seeing very many apps that are offering the right mix of not too much and not too little information. Forgiven: it’s a new medium. The trick is going to be getting this mix right, and I’m excited to see the developers rise to the challenge of this new space.

9. Read only.

The Apple Watch is mostly read only. Yeah, you can write in some ways in some places but it’s just not for that. And there’s some beauty there: you can stay on top of incoming information without being completely sucked into it. I would argue, strongly, that it’s helped me to be more in the moment, not less, simply because the immediate options are fewer. In this way it truly is an optional device akin to a Kindle or iPad, and not a total must-have. Like these non-essential devices, it will end up having a much longer refresh cycle than phones. Maybe that’s mixed news for AAPL stock holders, but it’s good news for consumers, who won’t want to feel pressured into upgrading an unsubsidized device very often.

10. Serious business.

In a great article on the impact of Apple Watch on businesses, Matt Dion of e-commerce provider Elastic Path gets the place of the Apple Watch very right:

“When you look at the Apple Watch as a missing link of omnichannel commerce (because it allows the digital form of a customer’s identity, preferences, and behavior to combine with their physical context to provide natural forms of guidance, utility and value) you can see that the businesses that will benefit most from this shift will be omnichannel retailers, transportation, travel, hospitality, live entertainment providers — basically, any enterprise with a physical component.”

Truth! I work heavily in retail innovation and experience design and my company, The Science Project, works with many retailers to create digitally-enhanced store and real world experiences. Retailers tell me two things all the time: “I definitely want my stores to be enhanced by digital experiences” and also “I don’t want my customers looking at their phones in my stores!” Enter Apple Watch and a new field of possibility. I’m very, very excited to work and play in this space and I believe the Apple Watch will become a key to unlocking customer value in the stores of the future.

Finally…

As you enter the narrow, poorly-lit fitting room, the mirror seems to highlight your every blemish, and the room smells like sweat and feet. There aren’t enough hooks, and you’re forced to set your items next to the dust balls on the floor. You exit defeated because you realize that you took the wrong size, but all of the sales associates are too busy to offer help, and the last thing you want is to do the process all over again.

No more!

Historically, retailers have under-utilized the power of the fitting room. Now, however, retailers are beginning to realize the importance of a positive fitting room experience and are seeking a way to increase their brand experience from start to finish. According to retail expert Marge Laney, 67% of customers who use fitting rooms are likely to make that purchase. Larger, more comfortable spaces, along with better lighting, may be key for both enhancing brand value and increasing customer loyalty.  

Retailers are also testing fitting room technologies to provide customers the most seamless shopping experience. For example, Rebecca Minkoff’s NYC store has a “smart” fitting room that includes interactive mirrors, adjustable lights, RFID technology and the ability to make purchases while in the fitting room. Here, Minkoff craftily infuses technology in the store without interrupting the shopping experience.

The Neiman Marcus mobile application is another perfect example of attracting customers into the fitting room. Sales associates are listed on the mobile app so customers can effortlessly call, text, email or FaceTime directly through the app whether they need help on the sales floor or in the fitting room.

Truly magical technologies are developing right before our eyes- next generation platforms and mashups of code, hardware, and design that will enchant, mystify and amaze us.

Some will declare greatness and build entire businesses around them, others will look closely and see where they fit in human behavior, customer experience, and customer purchase:

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. - Arthur C. Clarke

1. Virtual Reality - I’m not quite buying into customers wearing a giant headset, moving their head around in a virtual world, while having their friends snicker behind them. Still, this is truly transformative storytelling technology that will be used to create breakthrough interactions with real experiences! Imagine: front row at the Final Four or a fashion show. Well, VR is making it happen- coming soon!

2. Gestural Zero Interface Sensors - Touch, Touch and more Touch. Whether it’s our grandparents or our kids, Touch is still the mode that everyone understands. Soon, behavior will catch up to technology and new types of interfaces will radically transform our interactions. They may just be more simple than you think! For now; Touch it, Tap it, Pinch it!

3. Kill The Password - Dramatically named with potential for massive impact.Microsoft recently joined the charge to eliminate passwords and move toward bio-metric login (finger print is our simplest example). No single evolution could mean more for the notion of ‘frictionless shopping’ in the next 5 years.

4. Virtual Try-on Mirrors - It's beginning to get there! We’ve seen some cool stuff recently! The wooden experiences of old are being replaced by better and better technology. Is the mystical Cher’s Clueless Closet just around the corner?

There are obviously so many more exciting things on the horizon. From varsity level beacon implementations to new associate tools.