With the rise of e-commerce titans and online shopping services like Amazon, Walmart, and eBay brands have entered a precarious position in terms of satisfying consumer demand while maintaining interest within retail stores. With the rise of online availability, the need for items can be accomplished at the push of a button. However, some brands are trying to find ways to make retail stores relevant and interesting in today's consumer market. Have retail stores lost their touch? Alternatively, have they merely lost their vision of what the brand can look like offline. Online shopping is great, but when it comes to user experience, certain brands are taking matters into their own hands. 

Apple and Nike have already made drastic attempts at focusing their attention and shifting their flagship stores into immersive spaces that offer a grander sense of connectivity with the product. User experience and interactive design go beyond flashing lights and large tv monitors displaying product images every 3 seconds. If brands want their brick and mortar spaces to thrive focus is shifting towards how space can be genuinely intriguing and engaging. There is more to a retail space than featuring product and establishing a dedicated pos area. Brands are seeking to incorporate more texture, color, spatial design, and of course technology into their stores.

The goal for brands, both emerging and established, is to create newer and better ways to keep the customer engaged and invited to visit their store. Interactive elements that are not available in the digital realm of retail is what architects are assisting brands to accomplish. Take COS for example. The popular clothing brand has reached out to famed architecture firms like Snarkitecture and Mamou-Mani for their pop up shop locations. This year French architect, Arthur Mamou-Mani, is said to design a digitally fabricated pavilion that will allow visitors to explore a 16th-century palazzo. With the use of open-source parametric design software and modules constructed from bioplastic, the structure is said to exude an immersive futuristic element to the shopping experience. 

Architects are using a brand's identity and finding ways to translate them into their store interiors. For example, architect Li Xiang of X+Living Architecture Design studies the "bustling language of the city"  in order to create store interiors that transforms the shopper as they walk through Zhongshuge Bookstores. Having designed bookstore locations located in Shanghai and Hangzhou, Xiang uses full-height bookshelves along the walls of the store and mirrored ceilings to create an endless vertical perspective. According to Xiang, the space is said to mimic the various characteristics found on the streets in order to create a walkable "city of books" that allows the customer to walk at their leisure throughout the store. 

Customers are not entering retails stores merely to purchase products. Now, retail stores are being transformed into spaces where they can "escape" and be transported into a space curated specifically for the brand. Although this form of interior design and architectural application may not work in the same way for all retail shops like JC Penny, architects are stressing the value of curated space and immersive design. It's not only about capturing the sale but capturing the experience of the brand in the built environment.