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Personal style -

The influence of social media lifestyle content and television shows that emphasize the significance of personal style is mirrored in the shopping experiences that brands aim to create. Pictured are hosts of 'Queer Eye,' a personal and lifestyle makeover show.

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Lifestyle content -

Lifestyle content, once limited to fashion magazines targeting a particular socio-economic class, is now accessible to everyone.

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Reflecting your personal style at home -

Influential aesthetics, formerly reserved for those with more resources, has left its mark all over the internet. Finding your personal style and seeing it reflected in your living space, your clothes, and your online persona is the new normal.

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Target -

In the United States, this trend began in suburbia through the American retail chain, Target. Geared toward making everyday items aesthetically pleasing and affordable, Target 'targeted' middle-class women in their advertisements and product offerings.

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Collaborations -

In the past 20 years alone, the corporation has had nearly 200 partnerships with different brand names. Priced slightly more expensive than their home brand items, shoppers could own a Proenza Schouler, Marimekko, or Altuzarra piece manufactured in collaboration with the company.

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Lifestyle brand shift -

The aspect of brand partnership is important in describing the lifestyle brand shift. This is because products normally out of reach for the average shopper, through brand partnerships, become more accessible.

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Extended luxury shopping experience -

Similar to curating accessible luxury items, stores are also extending the accessible luxury experience into the places where customers shop.

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Investing in storytelling -

At the height of online shopping, this strategy offers resistance to the trend. Instead, brands are investing in storytelling, using specific campaigns to tie products into a design context.

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Shopping as an experience -

Through this method, a store is not just a place where you buy products, but instead turns shopping into an experience. Some brands are treating campaigns as a voyage, a “site-specific activation.” Pictured is Chrissy Teigen in the Flamingo Estate pop-up store, a curated shopping experience.

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Contextualizing products -

Using historical sites, specific design references, landmarks, or other contexts, campaigns transform a simple product like a candlestick into a story.

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The potential story -

The candlestick is no longer the product in itself, but the potential story that the candlestick tells in a specific context that it’s photographed in.

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Creating an experience -

Similarly, in-store experiences are, too, attempting to create a story. As soon as you walk in, you should not only identify with the context and the products but find yourself fully submerged in it.

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Blurring boundaries -

This trend is part of the shift that brands are confronting to cross over into design and interiors. Product launches are grounded in a design context, “blurring the boundaries between commerce and environment.”

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Telling a story -

Emma Apple Chozich, founder of gr8 collab, describes how brands are contextualizing their products to tell a particular story about the brand and the product itself.

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Examples -

Chozich offers a number of examples of this trend. Brands like Zara Home, Flamingo Estate, Jenni Kayne Ranch, and Aesop are on her list, a few of which we’ll explore in the next slides.

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Zara Home -

Zara Home has made extensive investments in capsule collections. Following their collective debut in 2022, architecture and design powerhouse Vincent Van Duysen (pictured) has collaborated with the brand several times.

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Living room items -

The first collaboration focused on living room items and aesthetics. Seating, tables, chairs, and accessories, rooted in Van Duysen’s design archives, revisit his own iconic style in more accessible formats.

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Dining room -

In their second collaboration, Van Duysen focused on the dining room, playing with different proportions and colors, creative seating, and furniture that attempts to cultivate intimate dining gatherings.

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Refined -

The images accompanying the campaign are striking and refined. High ceilings and minimalist aesthetics point to the feeling of quiet luxury, transporting customers through the campaign's story.

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Store design -

Zara Home's vision doesn't just stop with campaign imagery. The corporation has not only invested in its online branding and campaign materials but also in its store design.

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Collaboration with architect -

Intending to, according to Fashion Network, create a “more immersive shopping experience,” their autumn 2024 layout was designed by Spanish architect Elsa Urquijo.

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Aesop -

Collaborating with people like artists, filmmakers, or with other entities, such as British fashion brand, RAEBURN, the global skincare brand Aesop follows a similar strategy to Zara Home.

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Cinema as a source of inspiration -

Aesop’s creative director, Marianne Lardilleux, looks to cinema as a source of inspiration for the stores’ brick-and-mortar locations around the world.

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Partnerships -

In Texas, their Knox location took inspiration from Wim Wenders' 1984 film 'Paris, Texas.' The brand partnered with film director Luca Guadagnino (pictured) in 2018 and 2019 to design two of their locations in Rome and London.

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Product names -

Even the brand’s products nod to cinematic influence. A body oil called 'Breathless: A Bout of Souffle,' makes reference to a Jean-Luc Godard film.

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Immersive experience -

Lardilleux shares that when the brand designs a new space, they seek to engage all of the senses. She shares that the brand wants to mimic the experience of “entering the cinema – this immersion in a new territory.”

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Fine details -

Lardilleux’s background, in architecture and visual arts, points to how retail visionaries are emerging from different fields that can go into the fine details of the shoppers’ experience.

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Distinctive experience -

Shopping in stores like these becomes an immersive and distinctive experience, where the products are there, but it’s everything around them that tells their story.

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Drawing in shoppers through messaging -

Investing in this form of storytelling draws repeat shoppers and creates exciting, curated messaging that finds different ways to rope culture into everyday items.

Sources: (Sociology of Business) (Wallpaper) (gr8 collab) (Fashion Network)

See also: This is why storytelling is good for your health

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