Brands Are Borrowing Places Instead of Building Them
The flagship store isn't disappearing, but it feels like brands have found a far more interesting way to show up.
I've started noticing brands popping up in places I never expected to find them.
For years, the goal was simple. Build somewhere permanent- a flagship on the right street, a headquarters people immediately associated with the brand. Somewhere that would be there for decades and outlive us all.
Now it feels like the opposite.
Instead of building new places, brands are borrowing existing ones, completely reimagining them for a weekend, then handing them back with the keys. Somewhere, there's a 50+ email thread making it all happen.
Brands borrowing places:
Burberry has wrapped One&Only Aesthesis on the Athenian Riviera in its signature check.
Dior has opened its first spa inside Hotel Cipriani in Venice.
Carhartt WIP turned Berlin’s KINDL Centre for Contemporary Art into a skate park. The former brewery somehow looks like it was always meant to be one.
Nordic Knots temporarily turned Eltham Palace into its own tennis club to launch a tennis-inspired rug collection.
The more I see them, the more it feels like the same creative brief.
The new playbook seems to be borrow somewhere people already know. Completely reimagine it. Pack everything up on Sunday night and leave like nothing ever happened.
If you’re anything like me and have about 47 tabs open in your brain at any given time, you can’t keep telling yourself you’ll go next month because there isn’t a next month. It has the same urgency as a sold-out exhibition or a restaurant residency. You either make time for it, or you spend the next six months saying, “Wait... I swear I saved that.”
It also feels like the lines are getting blurrier. Retail borrows from hospitality. Hospitality borrows from culture. Culture borrows from events. At some point you’re no longer sure whether you’re walking into a campaign, an exhibition or somewhere randomly.
Maybe that’s the new flagship, a place without a permanent address.
What brand pop-ups, takeovers or temporary spaces have caught your eye recently?