Ambitious New Pop-Up Store On London’s Oxford Street Borrows On Nearby Outernet London’s Visual Scale

September 30, 2024 by Dave Haynes

Something that might be described as a pop-up retail version of the immersive, LED-driven Outernet London attraction is opening soon just a couple of blocks away, on the UK capital’s busiest high street.

Future Stores will fill the Oxford Street-facing ground floor of a commercial block, using big entryways and curtain wall glass to give passersby a view of a cavernous and minimalist retail space that has its walls and ceiling lined with fine-pitch LED.

Anyone who has seen Outernet London a couple of blocks away will have a sense of what this will look like, though the operation and mindset is very different. Outernet books its main space and a smaller adjacent area for events, like car launches, but is mainly about public art that people can just walk in off the street and watch, at no charge. Future Stores is about retail.

Located at 95 Oxford Street, adjacent to one of the main entrances to the very busy Tottenham Court Road station for the cross-city Elizabeth Line, Future Stores will be the digitally-driven blank canvas for brands that want to launch or promote products or services in a high-traffic, high-visibility retail space, but only want to do so for a short-period, and not be signing 5 or 10-year leases and building store interiors.

The idea is similar to the Sook pop-up retail concept that started in London and spread to other large cities, which unfortunately failed to get traction, and was wound down after a handful of years. This mew concept is much larger in scale, and where Sook had tiled single rows of LCDs lining small footprint shop walls, this is a BIG space dominated by the visuals.

The 435 sq. meters store is set to open at the end of October, and is expected to create 40 jobs. Roughly 400 sq. meters of the store will be covered with LED, and, as you might imagie, there will be tech in place to do audience measurement and data capture.

The guy behind this will be familiar to lots of retail digital signage people – Ariel Haroush, the CEO and founder of Outform. I was chatting with him several weeks ago about something entirely different, and he’d mentioned this concept store was in the works for this fall.

This is a separate thing from Outform, which self-describes as an innovation agency with offices all over the place, including a main one on Miami. Haroush says he will be involved at Future Stores as Chairman, but also stay on as CEO at OUTFORM.

From Haroush:

Let’s face it: the retail industry moves too slowly, and tomorrow’s shoppers are not waiting for anyone! The attention span of shoppers is getting smaller and smaller over the length of a TikTok/Instagram feed. How do we get shoppers to notice? Why can’t the High Street be as dynamic as our social feed? This is exactly what Future Stores is trying to solve. In a world that never stops, Future Stores move at the speed of culture. This is Retail Reimagined.

This makes a bunch of sense to me, for a lot of the reasons that Sook founder John Hoyle laid out when I chatted with him in London for a podcast: The whole rationale behind this is that if you facilitate hourly access to units like this, which would otherwise be empty, you can actually drive three to five times more revenue than a traditional lease because you are making use of the time before, you know, standard rent is over a 10-year period, deeply inefficient because someone sits in a space and expects there to be effectively making all of their money on in the peak hours whenever those are, which is like a Saturday. Using this you can drive your own footfall, drive different peaks across 120 hours of the week and generate more revenue, as well as make it much more efficient for occupiers to come and engage with the space. 

I don’t know what what led to Sook’s failure, but I’m guessing one factor, at least, would have been the scale of the stores. The 58 Oxford Street location of Sook, 450 feet down the street from where Future Stores will be, was relatively small … kind of the scale you’d imagine for a place selling mobile phone accessories. I’m guessing big global brands wanted/required something much bigger and buzzier.

If you work for one of those big brands – let’s say athletic shoes or an airline touting a new business class product – you are likely looking for a space that makes a statement, but to make it happen then have to contract out all kinds of companies to bring in all of the AV tech to create an experience – and maybe need to also sort out some things like decor and payment systems. It’s a BIG project, especially for something that might have a life measured in days.

The idea here, I assume, is Future Stores handles the back-end and the brand people mostly need to know what they want to do and how they will communicate that on the dynamic walls and ceilings.

I am now wishing I had more than an overnight in London when heading to and from ISE in Barcelona early next year. In late and out early, so no time to zip in to the city.

This, by the way, is what Outernet looks like …