Adidas partnered with Code and Theory to create a new vision for the Adidas Running retail experience and elaborate concepts that would help bridge the physical and digital – and meaningfully engage the runner audience.
It’s not a secret. Retail is in the midst of an evolution, created by customers’ changing expectations for what a retail experience should be – with e-commerce playing a growing role in people’s shopping habits. But despite the apparent advantages of e-commerce, around 80% of purchases still take place in stores. Customers still choose retail because they crave differentiated brand experiences, which is why there is a strong opportunity to better connect the physical to the digital.
The traditional user journey has always been a straight line heading towards conversion. But today’s customer journey is a fluid series of micro-conversions that take place across digital platforms and physical experiences.
Adidas can continue to succeed with customers by creating value at every touchpoint in this non-linear journey, through a holistic experience that drives conversion.
In order to create concepts that are truly engaging and valuable to the runners community, our team conducted research to better understand their mindsets and motivations.
Emerging technologies can enable retailers to situate brick-and-mortar stores within a journey of personalized touchpoints – all designed to drive consumers from digital to physical environments, and back again.
Our team developed 4 concepts – Make The Product Talk, Run The Numbers, See It In Action, The [Un]locker Room – for Adidas Running to test in store and iterate on, as part of the larger Adidas brand ecosystem.
This concept aims to deepen the product discovery experience. Pick up a shoe on the shelf – and trigger a video of the product in action. This also scales to garments, activating content in fitting rooms.
From splits and stats to maps and paths, running is a data-rich endeavor. This concept takes it from phone screens to big screens and makes it a shared experience for the running community.
Dynamic, interactive in-store walls will visualize everything from community leaderboards to popular routes to products to weather – in real-time, for like-minded runners.
This also offers opportunities for content integration from the in-store execution across e-commerce to connect products to real running stories and data. Customers can thus connect to the Adidas Running community from anywhere.
This concept aims to re-invent the “click and collect” experience with added convenience and in a way that is scaleable across different types of stores, whether flagships, owned retail, wholesale and even pop-up activations.
For those that reserve online, this enables quick pickups at retailers, via lockers that contain products—and unlock memorable moments.
Runners want to see and feel benefits of products in action. But clothes on a rack don’t tell much of a story. This concepts offers a playful experience to learn about the latest gear by telling a physical story with augmented reality.
My role: research, ideation & concept development, product strategy, UX design.
Engagement lead: P. Steiner, 2018.
If you’re interested in seeing intermediary deliverables and process / approach documentation, feel free to get in touch :)