Retailers and property managers planning new store sites have more tools at their disposal—in the form of pop-up stores and automation technology—than they did just a few years ago. With technology and a temporary site, the companies can bring an online-style experience to consumers and use technology to test how well shoppers respond to a store before making a permanent commitment.
New York-based retail strategist company The Lion’esque Group is planning the launch of a pop-up store experience, in partnership with Chicago’s General Growth Properties (GGP), which will feature RFID technology to track the movements of shoppers throughout its space. The system will enable customers to create a shopping cart-style list of products they may wish to purchase at a later date.
The system will be taken live on Aug. 24, 2017, at the Water Tower Place shopping mall, and could be rolled out at other locations throughout the country next year, says Melissa Gonzalez, The Lion’esque Group’s CEO and founder. The technology was created by The Lion’esque Group spinoff Field Test, in partnership with Impinj and d4c.
The Chicago deployment will include RAIN UHF RFID-enabled keys for customers, cards representing the products in a “key bar,” and gateways installed in ceilings, as well as readers installed at other locations throughout the facility. In addition to the RAIN RFID hardware, Impinj provides its ItemSense software platform that filters and manages the collected read data, calculates RFID tag locations, and forwards that data to Field Test’s software, according to Larry Arnstein, Impinj’s business-development VP.
The Lion’esque Group launched in 2009 and has since produced more than 100 pop-up store experiences. This year, the company has partnered with GGP to offer a connected pop-up-style store known as In Real Life (IRL). The storefronts, which will be live at Water Tower Place, will feature 12 brands following a home-life theme. The first one, launching in Chicago this month and throughout the winter holidays, will focus on home and living, and includes such products as Maiden Home furniture, Swoon Living glasses and decanters, mattresses from Leesa, Kassatex bathroom furnishings and UGallery artwork.
The system will also offer a ping pong table and accessories from Killerspin that shoppers can try out. Many of the brands do not traditionally sell products at brick-and-mortar stores, Gonzalez says. With the IRL storefronts, the products will be on display, allowing customers to see, touch and interact with them, then place orders online.
Throughout the years, The Lion’esque Group has seen the growth of pop-up-style storefronts at which brands seeking permanent spaces for storefronts conduct a shorter-term event in which they can sample the market while bringing their products to customers in a physical site. What started as very short events spanning a few weeks or a month has evolved to three- to six-month deployments, Gonzalez says, and the number of installations is increasing. The Lion’esque Group produced 21 such stores last year, a quarter of which transitioned permanently to the same site they used for the pop-up.
An important aspect of these deployments is the use of technology to understand the number of customers the stores attract, as well as purchases. The Lion’esque Group’s customers have used very simple systems of motion detection that count the individuals entering the store (that number could be compared against sales data), as well as much more complex—and high-cost—solutions that could include cameras, motion sensors and RFID.
What Gonzalez envisioned was an automated system that could be more holistic, capturing data regarding traffic movement throughout the store, as well as enabling customers to collect information about what they viewed. She sought to develop a system that would be easy to deploy at a temporary site. To that end, Gonzalez formed Field Test and partnered with Impinj and d4c to create a system that, she says, helps to enable a shopping experience for customers—similar to the experience of online shopping. With the resultant RFID system, she reports, customers can create a history of what they view, while retailers and brands can view what kind of interest each product generates.
“To me, it’s like adding another layer to make a partnership [with brands and retailers] more successful,” says Gonzalez. Companies could use the acquired data to better understand how many shoppers visit, whether or not they make purchases, and the times and days of greatest traffic. Ultimately, such information could help them to better strategize how and where they sell the products.
The store, located at Water Tower Place, will feature 11 brands selling a variety of furnishings in a home environment that includes living and dining areas, as well as a study, a bedroom and a bar. The Lion’esque Group will offer keys (at launch, 800 such keys will be available) with embedded Impinj Monza R6 chips. Each key’s chip will have a unique ID encoded on it. When a customer arrives at the store, he or she will take a key that will not be linked to that shopper’s identity. The store will contain multiple zones based on reads from an Impinj xSpan reader. An Impinj Speedway Revolution reader and two antennas will be used in the key bar.
The readers capture each key’s location as it enters the space, then tracks where it goes and where it dwells. If an individual stops to sit on a couch or lie on a mattress, or if he or she spends significant time in front of a specific product, the ItemSense software will capture that information and provide it to Field Test, whose own software manages the collected data. In that way, both the brands and GGP can better understand which products are drawing interest from customers—information that can be paired with the point-of-sale data regarding items actually sold.
At the key bar, the store is equipped with cards representing each product a shopper has viewed, such as a couch or chair. Customers are instructed to select the card of any product they would like to put on a wish list, and to place the key and card in close range to a 14-inch by 14-inch desktop with a Speedway reader built into it. The reader will be configured to capture tag reads at short range so that it can identify only those cards and keys deliberately placed in that area by a shopper.
The customer is then invited to use a touchscreen to input his or her mobile phone number in order to receive a text message linked to the products of interest. In this way, the shopper has the benefit of seeing the items in a real-life setting, while creating a record of goods in the manner of an Internet shopping experience. He or she could make a purchase at the store using an Apple iPad provided onsite, or online at a later date.
The initial deployment could lead to more implementations with expanded applications, Gonzalez says. The Lion’esque Group wants to determine how well it can track the movements of individuals and the value that information brings, as well as the benefits of the key bar-based system for customers. Filed Test could then begin offering greater functionality to benefit customers, such as enabling them to link their data—such as their e-mail address, phone number or social-network accounts—to the key, in order to capture and store data in real time about their interests at the store.
The RAIN RFID-based system will bring threefold benefits to the shopping experience, Gonzalez says: “the value of mobile, value of online and value of physical shopping.” Customers can manage data on their phones, create a trail of any products that interest them, and still view and experience the products physically.
The Water Town Place IRL with the home-life theme is intended to remain open through January 2018, followed by several other features that are slated to last a year. GGP operates 127 retail properties throughout the country, and the IRL store could be deployed at some of those during the course of next year.