Most Interesting Pop-up Stores by Luxury Brands

The concept of creating a temporary physical retail space that imbibes a brands identity, story and personality has been observed across many decades and is proven to be extremely effective when it comes to providing a positive customer experience. Economic brands have been following the trend of setting up Pop-up stores ever since the evolution of the retail market, which attempts to cater to the target audiences with better and well developed strategies.

For more than two decades now, the luxury industry has transitioned in to making their brand more accessible to a larger audience. Apart from digital platforms playing a big role in increasing accessibility, the concept of pop-up stores has brought about a vast change in the way that people perceive luxury brands.

A Brief History of Luxury Pop-up

The idea of Pop-up stores, known as guerilla store back in the day, was first popularized by a Japanese brand called Comme des Garcons in the year 2004. The first ever Pop-up shop ideas were pitched in the early 2000’s and Japanese designer Rei Kawakubo was first to set it up in Berlin. Since then, there was a boom in building on the idea of having a physical space that the brand is free to play around with and make it represent the brands personality.

In the years to come, many fashion labels continued to explore the benefits of this and soon the concept of pop-up was familiarized globally, across multiple major locations such as Los Angeles, Singapore, New York, Glasgow and more.

Why Pop-up stores are a good idea?

With the advent of digitization becoming so excessively popular, managing a physical retail space has become all the more challenging in terms of high rents and lowered footfall. Today, luxury brands not only appeal to the upper class of society but are also targeting millennials and gen-z as part of their customer base. In order to successfully achieve that, some changes were to be brought out so that these brands can stand out and attract the right customer base, while considering the best market to do so.

Since the younger generation is well versed with the ‘cart system’, where online browsing, shopping and the whole digital experience has almost become a trademark method of shopping, brands need to expand their creativity and come up with concepts that will not only attract these customer but also deem profitable for them in the long run. Creating a customized pop-up store allows these brands to do just that and also is a great tool to represent the creative potential of the brand to its target audience.

Some of the main reasons as to why the concept of Pop-up shops are so appealing to customers are:

• The ease of Accessibility
• Allows Creative Experimentation for brands
• Can be set up to look more attractive than a physical store
• Comparatively informal and cost-effective
• Non-committal Exposure

Luxury Brands Pop-ups

Many big brands like Louis Vuitton, Hermes, Alexander Wang and Chanel have set up luxurious pop-up stores with innovative concepts and creative branding. These stores can be set up for anywhere between one day to a year, depending upon the creative campaign and brand strategy. Brands are also mindful about picking their location for a pop-up store. It is important to understand the customer demographics before setting up a store.

A spot that may have seemed as the most tertiary destination may now be the most relevant place.

Let’s have a look at some of the Most Popular Luxury Pop-ups in the world:

Life of Pablo

In 2016, Kanye West in partnership with Bravado, set up multiple pop-up stores across major leading cities in London, New York, Amsterdam, Berlin, Sydney, Melbourne and Toronto to promote his apparel brand, Life of Pablo. He used 21 pop-up stores to promote his new merchandise and only tweeted the location of these stores a night before the launch.

They had representation of the company within 40 territories all around the world. Because of the creative concept, the artist immense popularity and experimental design process, by the end of al promotional events- the brand had secured half a million worth of sales from each pop-up store and was one of the highest grossing clothing brands to make that kind of profits solely through pop-up stores.

Hermes

Hermes is known for its creative approach towards marketing the brand and has created one of the most popular luxury pop-up stores of all time. In 2017, the brand transformed a 1200 square foot area into what is called the ‘Hermesmatic’ Pop-up in Westfield Century City.

The iconic silk square scarf was the brands most popular product. Keeping that in mind, they introduced a pop-up consisting of all the brand colors where customers were allowed to get their square scarves dyed within 48 hours, absolutely free of charge. This completely revolutionized the manner in which luxury brands connected with their target audiences and encouraged other brands to bring about similar changes in their marketing mix.

Louis Vuitton

One cannot speak of luxury pop-up stores without mentioning Louis Vuitton and what the brand has done to transform luxury retail. The Creative Director, Virgil Abloh’s magic touch not only pushed the brand designing towards a fusion of luxury with street style but also paved the path to creating something completely different from what the brand stands for.

In 2018, the brand developed a series of travel pop-up stores inspired by the idea of exotic islands. This was created in order to launch the Spring 2018, Men’s Campaign. The Pop-up made its way across Miami, New York, Hawaii and Los Angeles and an LV bus was also revamped and parked on display right outside these stores.

It was also one of the first French fashion brands to set up a pop-up store in the Lower East Side of New York, that was then considered to be too edgy for high end fashion brands. They created some of the most iconic designs across 6000 square feet, by using neon color palettes to make the products look striking and stand out from the blend. This was concept was created in order to showcase the Louis Vuitton Autumn 2019 collection.

Fendi

The luxury Fashion house has created some of the most creative luxury pop-up stores around the world. The most iconic stores of them all was the Fendi- Selfridges partner store in London which was a two-week long ‘Flowerland’ exhibition developed in order to reveal the brands new spring-summer collection.

To add to the visual appeal of this pop-up store, Fendi also collaborated with world renowned artist Azuma Makoto to create floral displays and 3-D motifs along the products. What was most talked about was the entrance of the pop-up, which was decorated with floral designs, an ape truck, bouquets and floral collars.  The brand also pays close attention to the locations at which these stores are launched, with each store being open for at least few months before moving to another popular location.

Chanel

Chanel launched its arcade-like space on the rooftop of Galleries Lafayette in Paris, which went on to become one of the most legendary and luxurious pop-up store design that had been set up by any luxury brand before. This exclusive space was called the ‘Coco Game Club’ and was dedicated to launch their ‘Red Coco’ collection. The pop-up not only had a party like environment with live music and décor but also had organized for activities like virtual games around beauty and lip products, to give customers an insight in to what their product range is all about.

This year, the brand also went on to launch its very first online pop-up store for its beauty, skincare and fragrance line. The platform was launched in Hong Kong and will continue to feature online exclusives and new product launches all through the year.