experiential-retail
(7)
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.
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.