The Ordinary turns one of skincare’s more complicated ingredient stories into something people can actually understand. PDRN: Off The Hook uses a giant chrome salmon, playful interactions and hands-on product discovery to explain why its new PDRN eye cream is vegan. It’s a smart example of experience doing more than generating attention, using curiosity and participation to make product education genuinely memorable.

Louis Vuitton transforms its Seoul Dosan store into La Bibliothèque, a library-inspired world built around discovery. Books, fashion, stationery, exclusive sneakers, personalisation and hospitality unfold across the space, encouraging visitors to browse rather than simply shop. The concept shows how physical retail can create value through curiosity, tactility and experiences that reward spending time in-store.

Tom Sachs’ 31 Rue Cambon rebuilds Chanel’s Parisian world by hand using plywood, cardboard, paint, broken glass and found materials. The result strips luxury back to its underlying codes, asking where value really sits: in material, labour, memory, branding or desire. By making the construction visible, Sachs turns imitation into a sharp study of authorship, craft and the cultural machinery of luxury.

Ami Paris turns a 349-square-metre space in Shanghai into its own interpretation of a Parisian neighbourhood. Haussmannian architecture, Le Café Ami, customisation and playful brand codes create more than a backdrop for Fall/Winter 2026. Each element translates Ami’s ideas of friendship, optimism and Parisian ease into something physical, showing how a pop-up can behave like the brand rather than simply display it.

New Balance reimagines the performance shoe launch as a London street market for the SC Rebel. Inside Phonica Records, product trial sits alongside food, music, floristry, customisation and running culture, creating a tactile world rooted in Soho and the city beyond. More than a launch, the experience shows how product, place and community can work together to make performance feel culturally relevant and physically memorable.

Oatly paints an entire Cadillac green to sell some matcha. Its Berlin pop-up applies one shade across walls, socks, toothbrushes, even edible pieces, proving the concept isn't a gimmick but total and inescapable. A rotating calendar of happy hours, concerts, and croissant sessions gives people new reasons to keep returning, while the whole space is built to be photographed and shared from day one.

Converse leaves its own gallery unfinished, on purpose. Half-painted canvases and scattered tools turn visitors into participants, not observers. Deeper still, a Shanghai customization service lets visitors embroider local dialect and city landmarks onto their own shoes, turning a mass-manufactured sneaker into something that could only exist on this one street. Incompleteness, and locality, as the whole invitation.

New Balance builds a permanent home, not just a store, at The Grove. A staircase runs past an athlete wall, turning circulation into storytelling, while sequenced programming, a listening lounge, a café, a capsule machine, keeps giving people new reasons to return. Leadership frames retail as belief-building, not selling. The lesson: a flagship becomes infrastructure once it outlives its own opening weekend.

Lacoste turns a rooftop pool into a tennis court you can swim in. Its Mondrian Seoul takeover lifts "Tennis Court by the Beach" off the campaign page, covering sunbeds and parasols in the brand's exact clay-court colour. Rather than build a pop-up, Lacoste borrowed an existing leisure ritual, an afternoon people were already going to spend poolside, and made sure it happened inside the brand's own colours.

On builds its first Brazilian stores out of São Paulo's own concrete. JK Iguatemi channels SESC Pompeia's brutalist textures; MorumbiShopping translates Oscar Niemeyer's Copan Building into flow and rhythm. Two distinct references, not one repeated template, giving Swiss design DNA somewhere local to land. Framed as gathering places for movement, not just retail, these stores are core infrastructure for a brand growing its owned channels globally.

Morphe opens a coffee shop to sell a makeup brush. Its Duke Street pop-up serves the actual Iced Mocha and Oat Latte drinks that inspired the collection, letting sensation do the explaining before a single consultation begins. For a brand rebuilding after bankruptcy, choosing tactile, service-led experience over discount marketing is a confident statement — and Selfridges' beauty hall is exactly the stage built for it.

K18 and Uncommon Creative Studio rolled a 10-foot ball of real human hair through the streets of New York to launch the brand's new FutureIQ longevity serum. Dubbed the Tumblehair, the installation represents the 167 billion hairs New Yorkers lose to shedding annually — taking something people endure quietly and making it physically impossible to walk past. Gross, clever, and entirely on brief.

Arc'teryx celebrated the opening of Australia's first Alpha Store, the largest in the Southern Hemisphere, with a dinner beneath the glass dome of Sydney's Queen Victoria Building. A mountain tablescape of native flora and moss ran the length of the banquet table. The menu moved from Forage to Climb to Summit. The store beneath it spans three floors and does nothing by halves.

Pandora's Battersea Power Station pop-up for Pandora Wonders x Harry Lambert proved that scale isn't what makes physical retail work — intent is. One-of-a-kind pearl charms, a giant Pearl Pufferfish installation and pearlescent ice cream sat at the centre, but the real insight was connected thinking: the same story carried into store windows across the UK and North America, extending one narrative well beyond a single weekend.

Zegna has brought its Oasi Zegna platform to Aspen this summer with an activation that runs from the storefront outward. A tree-ring awning, fingerprint tote bags, a branded cargo bicycle, an aspen tree broadsheet, and a window carrying the line Your Fingerprint, Your Legacy together form one of the most visually coherent brand moments of the season, rooted in over a century of genuine conservation work.

Fenty Beauty turns fifty shades of foundation into a teahouse wall. Its Chengdu concept store translates "beauty for all" out of language and into tile, thread, and texture — a shade-matching counter paced like a tea table, mahjong tiles worked into the furnishings, a Shu embroidery portrait built stitch by stitch. Inclusivity, demonstrated in material rather than stated on a shelf label.

Lululemon puts a studio where the stockroom used to be. Cheongdam's reopening turns a decade of community into a physical, bookable space; yoga, barre, and training led by brand ambassadors, in the same building where customers would otherwise just browse leggings. It's proof of "well-being" and "mindful movement," not a claim on a hangtag. Loyalty, turned into a habit.

LOEWE Perfumes has chosen Dunas de Formentera as the setting for its Pistachio summer activation; a sensory takeover running through the end of August on Migjorn Beach. The brand's new Pistachio scented candle, handcrafted in Spain and housed in glazed terracotta, sits at the centre of a tactile installation woven into the hotel's architecture. Formentera is the first stop. New York, London, Paris, Shanghai, Tokyo, and Seoul follow.

Swiss performance brand On has opened its first UAE store at Mall of the Emirates in Dubai — a 265 sqm space featuring the brand's full CloudTec® footwear, apparel, and accessories offer. The opening marks On's third GCC location following Riyadh and Kuwait, with nine more planned across the region. What sets it apart is the community that was already there long before the doors opened.

FARM Rio turned a Saint-Tropez grocery into its own origin story. Dropping a Carioca market into Place des Lices' existing rhythm, fruit crates and hand-painted beach chairs among the produce, the brand quietly rebuilt the market stall it began as in 1997. It's proof the strongest resort pop-up isn't the loudest one, but the one specific enough to a brand's history that only it could have built it.

ASICS turned walking into a four-stage video game. Its Chengdu pop-up builds an entire urban streetscape around the new GEL-PHAI Z, splitting the journey into an Energy Station, a Photography Booth, a Paced Research Institute, and a Teamwork Game Center. By building around walking, not running, ASICS found the one action requiring no skill or training to join — and made an everyday habit feel worth showing up for.

SKIMS has opened its first standalone UK flagship on London's Regent Street; 12,000 sq ft, designed by Rafael de Cárdenas, and the brand's largest retail location in Europe. A Vanessa Beecroft sculpture greets visitors before they move through curved, tactile spaces housing the brand's fullest UK assortment yet. The opening lands alongside new flagships in Dubai and India. Physical retail, for SKIMS, is no longer a side note.

Victoria Beckham Beauty made a fragrance something you can taste. Inside Caffe Paradiso, a bespoke Iced Vanilla Bergamot Latte translates the actual note profile of Portofino '97 into something customers can order and describe, not just smell. Paired with a genuinely loved Nolita café rather than a rented backdrop, it's proof that the strongest activations find the second sense that makes a memory physically graspable.

Glossier turned its SoHo flagship into a bodega — apple crates, a scratch-off card, a Big Apple tee at the counter — and that's the whole point. The apple-flavoured I ❤️ NY Balm Dotcom only makes sense once you're standing inside the space itself. The real craft: handing the same balm to ten actual New York bodegas, closing the loop between the flagship and the city it's imitating.