Goodr and Experiential Supply Co. turned the new retail store into a tropical, Instagram-ready paradise. “The common theme from the start was to make this busy and colorful, but tastefully done with an obvious artistic touch,” explained Smith.Photo: Courtesy of goodr
LOS ANGELES—As brands and retailers struggle to get consumers back to their brick-and-mortar stores, many are turning to experiential marketing and event tactics for inspiration. One brand that recently pulled this off effectively? Los Angeles-based sunglasses brand goodr, which unveiled the goodr Cabana in Venice Beach, Calif., on Aug. 14.
While the space debuted with a buzzy VIP preview event, the new, immersive retail store feels like a party in and of itself: It’s a colorful, tropical paradise just ready-made for Instagram posts, with fun touches that evoke the brand’s cheeky marketing and memorable product names (which include Flamingos on a Booze Cruise, Influencers Pay Double, Amelia Earhart Ghosted Me and Mai Tai Me Up Daddy, among others).
The brand took a highly strategic approach to the new store, spending a year imaging, designing and building—and the team's goals and lessons learned echo those of any good experiential experience. “The brief for the cabana was to inspire awe from the second you see it, to the moment you set foot inside, through the excitement you have when you tell your friend, and every little detail and interaction in between,” explained goodr co-founder and CEO Stephen Lease. “We live in a very digital world, and we pride ourselves on the digital experience we create for our customers. But until the goodr Cabana, we had never been able to create a real-world experience that accurately represented the brand."
He continued, "We are an escapism brand and we wanted to make sure people could escape for just a moment.”
The internal goodr team worked with Experiential Supply Co., a full-service experiential design and event production company, on the design and build-out. “The visual brief was tropical surrealism, and the experience brief was 'attract, capture, engage,'” said Lease. "For some people, engagement means posting photographs of them on Instagram. For others, it means just having fun so you can tell your friends about it, or touching our product and looking in the mirror and feeling great. No matter what type of engagement you like, we want everybody to escape from their everyday life for a moment."
Jasen Smith, founder and CEO of Experiential Supply Co., noted that capturing the brand’s irreverent voice was key to the space. “Goodr has such a unique personality as a brand, and that made the entire creative process a lot of fun when we started asking ourselves what we wanted the cabana to become,” he remembered. “Even from the exterior, before you even step inside, you know the brand plays by their own very fun rules.”
To build the space, Smith continued, the team wanted to take a busy and colorful—but also tasteful and artistic—approach. “We wanted to tell a story step-by-step through the cabana, and to do so we incorporated goodr’s history in timeline form, fun quotes, micro art installations and very unique display tactics,” he said. “All of this swallowed up inside an explosion of colors, patterns and lights created a one-of-a-kind experiential retail experience.”
Scroll down for a look inside the tropical space.
