experiential-retail
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Christina McGonagle Is Turning Fashion Marketing Into a Place People Want to Stay
The Outcast CMO has spent a career learning how attention becomes belonging. Her playbook joins performance discipline with parties, pop-ups and creator experiences people choose to talk about.
The Times Square Store Where Shaq Dropped $10,000 - and Nobody Was Trying to Sell Him Anything
A tech store in the old Times Square McDonald's asks a strange question: what if you never had to buy anything to have a good time? Its first repeat customer was Shaq, and he came back with a checkbook.
DICK'S Is Turning the Sporting-Goods Store Into a Playing Field
A $300 bait-shop bet became a sports retail platform. Now DICK'S is testing a larger idea: the store as clubhouse, playground, media set and front door to a global sneaker business.
The store that turned crates and barrels into a $2.5 billion habit
Two newlyweds back from a European honeymoon opened a Chicago shop that stacked its merchandise on the packing crates it arrived in. Sixty years later the crates are gone, the design studios are here, and the receipts read $2.5 billion.
The Restaurant Chain That Turned Wine Pickup Into Date Night
Cooper's Hawk built a restaurant around a recurring ritual: pick up a monthly bottle, stay for dinner, and come back with friends. The result is a hospitality business whose most important ingredient may be habit.
The 2,200-Item Grocery Store That Turned Errands Into Theater
Most supermarkets compete by stocking more. Stew Leonard's built a $500 million-plus family business by carrying less, making more in view of shoppers and giving the dairy aisle a cast of singing animals.
Sur La Table
The 1972 Pike Place kitchen shop that turned selling whisks into teaching dinner - and survived a pandemic bankruptcy by betting the store on the class.
Frank Berman
Frank Berman is the Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer of Bloomingdale's, where he has spent his entire 30-plus year career - starting in 1991 as a housewares business manager and rising through buying and loyalty roles to lead marketing for the 150-plus-year-old luxury department store. He built his reputation on keeping the brand 'fun,' framing Bloomingdale's as a place to buy wants not needs, and steering high-profile experiential campaigns from rotating themed pop-ups to the Wicked-themed holiday takeover and the retailer's 150th anniversary gala.
Figure8
Figure8 is a New York-based, experience-first development company founded by Maryellis Bunn and Manish Vora, the team behind the Museum of Ice Cream. It designs and operates 'experiums' - large-scale immersive, multi-sensory spaces built to draw people offline and into shared, playful, in-person moments. Backed by a $40M Series A at a reported $200M valuation, Figure8 builds and scales its own experiential brands while taking on commissioned activations for outside partners.