Top 10 Global Stores 2024

Retail With Purpose...

As we head far beyond the Pandemic it is clear that physical retail is back with a bang, and is also increasingly creating spaces with meaning and a brand mission.

Whether this mission is creativity, sustainability, or community, we call this ‘Retail with Purpose’.

All around the world the most inspiring new retail destinations combine a unique sense of place with a focus on immersive storytelling. This new mission-driven philosophy is all about offering richer, more unique and authentic experiences.

Industrial heritage buildings are repurposed as entertainment spaces for the 21st Century.

Pop up retail is more inventive than ever, and often better than the permanent. Museum style pop up exhibitions give brands space to dive into their own history and develop personalised small retail formats that can adapt to travel or concession spaces.

Department stores are fighting back with digital and physical creativity.

Food and hospitality continue to drive footfall and aspiration.

Let us take you on a journey to ten of our favourite retail spaces around the world...

10. Uniqlo Opera, Paris

Uniqlo has emerged from the pandemic as a champion of physical retail with purpose.

LifeWear is a philosophy that seeks harmony with the urban locations of its stores, celebrating unique heritage architecture and supporting local social causes. The strategy seems to be paying off, with profits up 43% in 2023.

Uniqlo’s Paris Opera store, which first opened in 2009 with fabulous futuristic design from Wonderwall, has reopened after 8 months of renovation with more floor space and a sophisticated new design that references the glorious architecture of the Opera next door. The original facade from 1866 is complemented with a grand neoclassical staircase.

Uniqlo’s mission is both community and sustainability driven:

‘My First Time at the Opera’ offers subsidised tickets to the Opera for families (€25 adults €10 kids).

Re:Uniqlo Studio is a repair and remake atelier, offering a limited-edition fleece jacket, upcycled by the young Parisian industrial designer Tom Ducarouge, sold exclusively in the Opera store.

9. Barnhill Stores, Dublin

Winner of the Retail Excellence Ireland National Food Store of the Year 2023, Barnhill Stores has to rate as one of the very best convenience stores in the world, with a fabulous focus on fresh food expertise and a stylish design that is entirely created by owner Dave Whelan.

The 5,000 sq ft store in the upmarket neighbourhood of Dalkey in Dublin was previously a Centra, but is now converted into a curated ‘department store’ of artisan food brands.

There’s full service fresh food counters, with an FX Buckley butcher, George’s fishmonger, Sherdian’s cheese and a theatrical Neighbourhood Market deli and sandwich counter. Coffee is supplied by Two Fifty Square coffee roasters.

Complementary suppliers, such as The Butler’s Pantry for high quality meals, are presented stylishly instore using their own branding.

Interior design and merchandising makes sophisticated use of colour, lighting, quality finishes and playful elements such as the fret cut tree.

The off licence with its fine wine room is superb.

This is world class independent retailing in action.

8. Veuve Clicquot Solaire Culture, Tokyo & London

Veuve Clicquot’s Solaire Culture global traveling roadshow pop up is a perfect example of immersive brand storytelling, where art, heritage and culture meets retail.

Celebrating the brand’s 250th anniversary across five continents, Solaire Culture is a museum style exhibition that showcases more than 2,000 items from the House archive, including original champagne labels and a bottle rescued from a Baltic shipwreck in the 1840s.

The exhibition tells the story of Barbe-Nicole Ponsardin; the original ‘Madame Clicquot’ and the innovations behind her business career. It is also a celebration of women in art and business, featuring original commissions from 9 female artists, including the iconic Yayoi Kusama.

Solaire Culture concludes with a champagne bar and a curated gift shop, where you can also personalise your own bottle of champagne. This is the template for a permanent concession at Printemps and stand alone travel concepts.

This is part of a wider strategy from LVMH to push innovative pop up creativity and storytelling, with artist collaborations.

7. Porsche Now Pop Up, London

Art continues to meet retail at the fabulous Porsche Now, which popped up for 7 weeks in late 2023 in Turbine Hall A at Battersea Power Station in London.

This wonderful re-imagination of the car showroom featured a new painted mural every week by a different artist, live streamed on their instagram page.

Events included barista classes, beauty seminars from Aesop, cycle simulator races, live music and appearances from brand ambassadors such as Emma Raducanu.

Porsche Now displayed one iconic Porsche each week; from the 911 G Series, the 911 Carrera S Cabriolet and 718 Cayman, to the GT4 RS Clubsport.

There was also a full size Porsche made out of flowers.

The retail element combined a full build your own Porsche showroom, with a customised Porsche Design watch, as well as a curated collection of Porsche Design clothes and accessories.

The staff were enthusiastic and welcoming and the coffee was great.

Why can’t all car showroom experiences be this good?

6. Battersea Power Station, London

Battersea Power Station represents both the mall of the future and of the past. A stunning restoration of Sir Giles Gilbert Scott’s Grade II* listed 1930s power station, it’s a celebration of industrial architecture, re-purposed by contemporary architects for the 21st Century, into a shop, live, work and play destination.

The ￡9 billion development of this huge 42 acre site is an entire new city district, with new homes for 25,000 people, and the European office HQ for Apple.

The two iconic Turbine Halls house the latest (and the last) major shopping centre to open in the UK, with 100 shops and a 24,000 sq.ft Arcade Food Hall, by Michelin starred JKS restaurant group.

The iconic control room B is now a stylish cocktail bar and one of the chimneys offers a panoramic lift experience.

The retail element of Battersea is coming online gradually and has yet to find its final form, but there's a host of new retail concepts and 2023 saw 10 new restaurant openings and 11.2 million visitors, with December sales up 52% on 2022 opening year.

5. Flannels X, London

Flannels X represents a new direction for the department store, becoming a dynamic and creative collaboration between art and retail, designed to appeal to the Gen Z consumer.

The ￡10 million Oxford Street Flannels flagship, which opened in 2019, was rebranded Flannels X in 2023 as an ‘ever evolving cultural playground for pop ups, gigs, exhibitions and exclusive brand experiences’.

Founded in 1976, but now part of Mike Ashley’s Frasers Group, Flannels sits at the top of its luxury division with 60 stores. It has seen a spectacular expansion across both the UK and Ireland since the Pandemic, filling the void of closed Debenhams stores with bold, experience driven spaces; complete with gyms and champagne bars.

Flannels X is a unique fusion of digital and physical, with a striking animated facade and digital exhibition basement, as well as creatively merchandised pop up installations on each of the 3 floors of retail in the 18,00q sq.ft space.

With collaborations from rappers, artists and designers, there’s always something new and inspiring.

That’s what great retail is about!

4. Gucci 'Romantic Futurism', Chengdu

The Gucci boutique in Chengdu is a beautiful example of digital art meets retail, where Florentine Renaissance architecture fuses with local nature in a constantly changing and evolving AI generated digital landscape.

Created by the supremely talented Random Studio , this unique Gucci store features 33 large LED screens set over 3 floors, around a central staircase.

Arranged like giant windows looking out through a cast iron framed orangery, the screens display constantly changing and morphing animations representing a romanticised mythical landscape of Classical villas, mountains, lakes, willows, Chinese hibiscus flowers, herons and giant butterflies.

Working in collaboration with AI image generators Midjourney, Stable Diffusion and Dall E2, Random Studio’s creative team balanced human artistic control and randomisation within an AI generative environment.

The result is a retail experience that has a unique, charming and whimsical sense of place.

3. SKP Chengdu

SKP Chengdu is a mall, department store and urban park all rolled into one, and is quite simply jaw dropping in scale and imagination.

With masterplanning from the geniuses at Sybarite , it covers 190 acres and half a million square metres of mixed use retail and hospitality, including two huge concept department stores and two mall arcades filled with luxury boutiques.

SKP Park on the top level features 33 botanical landscapes and 39m water sculptures, designed by James Corner Field Operations.

99% of the five level development sits underground up to 30m deep. The whole development only took three years to build.

SKP Chengdu follows the whimiscal Planet of the Apes style storytelling themes of the other amazing SKP stores which opened in Beijing in 2019 (now the world’s top selling department store, and Xian in 2021 (the world’s largest department store).

SKP Chengdu features futuristic design and giant animatronic space monkeys to create the theme of a utopian future where humans have bridged time and space.

Bonkers but beautiful!

2. Petco Flagship at Tammany Hall New York

Petco’s amazing New York flagship isn’t just the best pet store on the planet, it is one of the best retail experiences in any sector. It’s perfect proof of how expert and imaginative retail can be.

Developed inhouse by Petco’s creative team under Rick Neira and Angela Neira, the 25,000 sq ft, two floor store sits in the beautiful old Tammany Hall, a neoclassical building rich in New York political heritage.

Petco features a host of expert services; a barbershop-inspired dog grooming parlour called Ruff’s Barker Shop, a vet hospital offering wellness, dental and chipping, dog training in an indoor dog park, and a pet adoption service Petco Love Adoptions.

There’s also an instore Just Food for Dogs kitchen that cooks gourmet pet meals to order.

Premium pet accessories and apparel are sold at ‘17th & Bark’ and a Reddy department, merchandised with flair and style.

Interior design is a sophisticated reference to nature with beautiful tree like installation sculptures, whose leaves were hand made and painted.

Simply stunning world class retail.

1. RH England at Aynhoe Park, UK

RH England is quite simply exquisite; an immaculate fusion of architecture, nature and hospitality into the ultimate aspirational home retail setting.

It’s the first international outpost from American brand Restoration Hardware as it opens flagships across European cities in 2024.

RH England at Aynhoe Park is a 60 room stately home, built in 1615 and later embelished by Sir John Soane. It sits on 73 acres of beautiful English countryside with its own deer park and gardens from Capability Brown.

The interiors are a mix of classical revival and continental baroque.

RH’s restoration now features rare art, antiques and artefacts that decorate the interiors and the superb roomsets.

The ground floor features a stylish design library and interior design service, as well as an exhibition dedicated to Sir John Soane. But most of the space is dedicated to hospitality.

There are three restaurants; the Orangery, the Loggia for pizza, and the Conservatory.

There’s also a tea and wine salon and a juicery.

The store has the ambience of a boutique hotel and it’s a pity you can’t stay overnight.

Is this the most beautiful store in the world?

Very possibly.

Thanks for reading!

Matthew is the owner and founder of Echochamber, a London based retail trend agency that has travelled the world seeking out retail innovation since 1999. Echochamber.com is a free source of retail inspiration and innovation. Alternatively, you can be inspired by following Matthew on Linkedin or Instagram by following @myechochamber.

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