The Long Black Friday

In which your retail-pulse-fingering development design ronin pops down to London to check out what pop-ups have popped up. 

Amazon - Christian Louboutin - Anti-Black Friday - Google Curiosity Rooms - Bohemian Rhapsody - Pass On Plastic - Choose Love

First stop Shoreditch High Street, and The Home of Black Friday, Amazon.

Just through the door I score a drink voucher and goodie bag, and proceed to the first area, featuring an Amazon Locker full of prizes and a lucky dip for valid door codes once I add a real locker into my address book. I win… nothing.

Male & female grooming demo stations follow, along with a small selection, no, the favoured word is curation of clothes. The products are tagged with Amazon Smile Codes (essentially a proprietary QR code) that open the Amazon app to buy them online, not take away from the store.

Collecting a bourbon & ginger ale at the bar I head to the demo kitchen to see what I can get to go with it - and I find noneother than Jack Monroe cooking a sausage lasagne. One she prepared earlier is served to me in a paper cup as they have run out of plates! (I was at a conference last year where I was served shepherd’s pie in a mug, but that’s another story). I am impressed enough to buy her book (discounted to only ￡4.25, so rude not to).

We are in a relatively small space for the number of products, staff, visitors and mid-century set-dressing furniture (alas not for sale), and with the slight chaos that live cooking inevitably brings, the vibe in this zone is more house-party than retail store or corporate shrine, which I dare say is exactly what they were aiming for.

Standing on a shag-pile rug in the adjoining lounge, I interrogate clued-up representatives from OnePlus about their 6T phone, and from Canon about a Zoemini mobile photo printer, while avoiding stepping on a robot vacuum cleaner. Also present are a couple of handmade products, along with low-tech non-scannable paper discount vouchers for them, as if to show that while they may be riding on it, they are not part of the big machine.

I scrutinize a stool with an Augmented Reality label on it, but the app doesn’t seem sure what to make of it and the AR demo person has gone to find more paper plates. I exit through a rather under-utilised “winter wonderland” of real trees and artificial snow while an artificial intelligence (you know the one) plays Christmas hits, and I smile at a camera in the window to initiate a charitable donation. Fed, watered, book ordered and goodie-bag in hand, I head towards the underground.

I have plotted a course for the day heading west from Shoreditch, largely comprised of recent pop-ups reported by Retail Focus. Emerging from the underground at The Royal Exchange, I seek out Christian Louboutin. In the heart of The City, The Royal Exchange is a shopping mall. For millionaires. The doors do not open automatically as you are spotted by an IR sensor. They open automatically as you are spotted by doormen in suits, who greet you. The food court is by Fortnum & Mason. In my down jacket and flat cap I am dressed for the November weather, not for this sort of place. When I fail to locate what I am looking for a helpful doorman guides me to the unit, which is in fact on the outside of the building, where I belong. A small but perfectly formed store, bright red from floor to ceiling, which must be an interesting environment to work in all day. The precision and attention to detail, such as the copper axle that the wrapping materials are mounted on, is suitably impeccable. Did I pick up any Louboutin shoes? I just bought a recipe book titled “Cooking on a Bootstrap”, so what do you think?

Moving swiftly onward to Charring Cross Road, and the self-declared polar opposite of Amazon’s effort, the Anti-Black Friday pop-up by Lone Design Club. The keywords here are independent, sustainable and ethical. QR codes on the walls link you to the various small brands that have come together to gain a foothold in this premium location for a couple of weeks. I suspect that the workshops held in the event-space will be largely preaching to the converted. 

Back to mega-corporations, with Google up next, whose Curiosity Rooms have taken over the premises in Piccadilly Circus that I will always regard as “the place that used to be Tower Records”. With three large floors it is a gigantic space just to launch the Pixel 3 phone. Nothing is happening in the basement auditorium at the time of my visit. I wander around the pink ground floor learning about the new features of the phone in different demonstration zones. Google Lens is particularly impressive, identifying not just that it is looking at my trainers, but what relatively obscure brand they are without even seeing a logo. Nobody mentions that Lens is actually a free app that anyone with a smartphone can get without spending ￡700.

I climb the stairs to the sage-green first floor, with additional learning zones, event spaces, coffee shop and product store. And I am thinking: seriously, who has got time to visit all these zones? I get the idea, it really is a great phone, but it is being stretched too thin here while there is a lot more that could be sung about in this brand temple, and ample space in which to do it - show me more of the Google Home systems, mesh routers, Nest, Chromebooks, cloud apps and Google Earth. Expound on the insights mined from Big Data, the mind-boggling R&D, the corporate culture, the London and global offices and all the rest that adds up to what Google is, and you could start turning a mere potential purchaser of a Pixel 3 phone into an evangelical true-believer. My high-point is going back down to the ground floor on a slide, allowing the Top Shot function to capture my delighted face. But I leave empty-handed. 

Searching for something that will rock me, I head for Soho and the Bohemian Rhapsody pop-up. It is getting dark and the Carnaby Street Christmas lights are shining neon lyrics and the band’s heraldic logo.

On the ground floor there a piano with sheet music that you may play if you know how, and Roger Taylor’s drum kit, which you may not. I admire some superb photos and head downstairs, where four of Freddie’s costumes are on display. I am drawn into watching the Princes of The Universe (Highlander soundtrack) video on a wall, but I pass on getting inked in the fully-functioning tattoo parlour. 

Sadly, my penultimate pop-up is not so much Seven Seas of Rhye as seven seas of plastic. Sky Ocean Rescue has commissioned Pass On Plastic - more an eye-catching awareness-raising installation than a shop, although there is a range of celebrity-designed (or at least endorsed) plastic-alternative items such as steel water bottles for sale. I hand over a cereal bar wrapper to be recycled and receive a reusable beeswax wrap as an alternative to cling-film, worth ￡20, in return.  

And my last stop also highlights and helps another worthy cause. Choose Love sells the products that a refugee needs on arrival, in a camp, and making a future. The imaginative part is that when you buy these products you are actually making a donation to the Help Refugees charity. They may not have iconic Louboutin red soles, but I am confident that the boots I buy will be all the more waterproof for it. Just opened, the store promises surprise celebrity staff, events and promotions during its tenure. Let the momentum of your day's spending spree cause you to make impulse purchases here if nowhere else.

The Amazon and Anti-Black Friday stores close on 25th November. Google Curiosity Rooms is open until 16th December, Christian Louboutin till 31st December and the rest till 6th January.