Luxury Fashion Brands Have Different Priorities With Their Consumer Pop-Ups

Luxury fashion and beauty brands don’t often dabble in hosting consumer pop-ups. But when they do, you can expect them to go big with the scale and creativity of the experience. Gucci’s cosmetics line Gucci Beauty recently held its first-ever consumer pop-up to celebrate the launch of its new mascara, Gucci Mascara L’Obscur. In partnership with Sephora, the brand created Gucci Beauty Network Studios, which took over a vacant event space on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles from March 6-7. The brand themed the pop-up around a TV screen test, inviting guests to be a “protagonist” in a self-led tour of Instagrammable spaces where they could test out the new mascara and other Gucci Beauty products. These included a Gucci Guilty diner with fragrance centerpieces; a branded ‘80s-style reception desk for photos; and a backstage dressing room that had touchscreen vanity mirrors with video tutorials on how to apply the mascara. [kickout id="1"] Gucci Beauty is the latest high-end fashion brand to host a pop-up, joining the likes of Coach, Chanel and Louis Vuitton that have all executed their own activations in the past few years. Notably, most of these brands often decline to offer details behind their strategy to the media, according to spokespeople for Gucci Beauty and Chanel. (Louis Vuitton didn’t respond to Adweek as of publication time.) [article_summary section="1"]However, according to experiential agencies that frequently work with luxury clients, they often use experiences less as tools to generate new revenue, and more to connect with existing customers as well as attract new fans by showing off unexpected sides of their brands and providing spaces for content creation. Jack Bedwani, global business director and co-founder of The Projects, a brand consulting and experiential marketing agency, helped Coach launch its first external brand activation in 2018 called Life Coach, a weeklong experience in New York inspired by self-expression and astrology, specifically to engage a younger audience rather than sell products. Bedwani, who has also helped create pop-ups for Calvin Klein, said luxury fashion brands tend to have more time and means to deeply invest in their “brand DNA,” from products to packaging, the in-store experience and their aesthetic. “When we’re tasked to produce a pop-up for a luxury brand, we start with understanding everything about their brand DNA, and then we look to evolve it in a way that’s new, interesting and culturally relevant. Their brand aesthetic is the starting point, not the end goal,” Bedwani said. “We wanted to explore the cultural context of something up-and-coming at the time, which was new world spirituality.” [kickout id="2"] Located near Coach’s flagship store in SoHo, the experience spanned several rooms that creatively brought the brand to life, such as a Coney Island-themed space with carnival games and a mystical “forest” with booths for tarot readings. The pop-up, which also traveled to Japan and Hong Kong that year, purposely had subtle branding and no physical Coach products; instead, Coach opted to integrate symbols and icons synonymous with the brand into the set design, such as a unicorn cutout and its classic “C” logo. “Ultimately, the space enabled us to create a new relationship with a younger customer that saw Coach in a new light, and not in the same way Coach does their retail experience or fashion shows,” Bedwani said. “Introducing a brand experience to a younger, fashion savvy customer was the priority, and we were able to drive success metrics and results for Coach without having overt branding or product in the room.” [article_summary section="2"]Although the Coach pop-up had nothing to sell, its SoHo flagship, located a seven-minute walk away, saw a 300% increase in foot traffic in the week after the experience, according to Bedwani (he also noted that social sharing and an out-of-home billboard campaign helped drive results, too.) [kickout id="3"] When producing pop-ups for upscale rather than luxury brands, such as DTC luggage maker Away, the theme tends to veer more product-centric, Bedwani explained. For Away, The Projects produced a chalet-themed pop-up shop in February in Aspen, Colo., that was themed around the launch of the brand's new ski-inspired capsule collection. [article_summary section="3"]Bruce Starr, partner at global experiential agency BMF, which has produced activations for luxury clients like Calvin Klein and SK-II, said in general the agency approaches events for those clients with a different mindset in terms of attention to detail and finishing. “With luxury brands, there’s an expectation that ‘our product is made a certain way.’ Not that all brands don’t care about that, but most luxury brands are sticklers,” said Starr, pointing to an event his team produced for Calvin Klein fragrances that included a 100-page list of brand guidelines. “There might even be a mood board for what guests might be posting [on social] and what the posts will look like. Everything about how they want to portray that experience is well thought through.” Agencies might also have to make their own detailed list of event deliverables. “We create extensive decks for any event,” said Aaron Kirchner, executive creative director of BMF. “There might be up to 200 slides that highlight every detail of event execution, from social signage to brand ambassadors’ shoelaces.” Luxury fashion brands, naturally, spend a lot of dollars on these experiences. According to Bedwani, the price could be anywhere from $500,000 to $1 million if it runs for a week, to upward of seven figures for a larger-scale, ongoing project, such as those of Louis Vuitton. In 2019, the luxury French fashion house opened Louis Vuitton X, a five-month pop-up exhibition on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, which highlighted the LVMH-owned brand’s history of artistic collaborations. The 22,000-square-foot pop-up showcased some 180 items on two floors, including early 20th-century special-order trunks, art deco perfume bottles and window displays commissioned and designed by Louis Vuitton’s grandson, Gaston-Louis Vuitton. Gucci Beauty, Louis Vuitton and Coach’s pop-ups were free and open to the public with RSVP on custom landing pages. Bedwani noted that the decision not to charge customers depends on whether a brand's end goal is achieving sales, or making a new connection with consumers through the experience.