Wired's holiday pop-up store is a store where you’d probably prefer to go window shopping...because you can only go window shopping. Adam Balkin filed the following report.
Let’s play a little game. Try to figure out how to enter Wired magazine’s holiday pop-up store. I’ll give you a hint: it’s not the wood door. That’s for the neighboring apartment building. I’ll give you another hint: there is no door. There is no going inside.
Wired, instead of the usual walk-around-a-retail-space store, decided this year to instead just create a high-tech store window called the Always On store.
“The Wired Store Always On is our first phy-gital store. This is a half-physical, half-digital, always-on storefront where customers can come 24/7, see the products in person, check them out on the interactive touchscreen," says Noah Norman of Wired Store. "We have a selection of the products available in the online store featured here in the window, some of the coolest ones. As always, these are hand-picked products that are curated by Wired’s editors. And not only can you see them in the window here, but you can check them out on the interactive touchscreen, and when you select products, they’re highlighted here so you can see them blown up big on the screens facing the street."
Even though you obviously can’t buy anything here, you can add anything you see that you like to your wishlist through a touchscreen. That wishlist then gets texted to you with links showing you where you can buy this stuff.
"We think that the phy-gital format matches how customers are shopping now," Norman says. "People are shopping mobile, they’re shopping online, the combination of physical and digital really reflects how people have been shopping and as always it’s the same format in a certain sense as it’s always been. Our pop up store has been a place where you can see and check out the products but you’d always be purchasing them online anyway."
Since, of course, everyone can’t necessarily get to the window, all of the products highlighted can also be found at store.wired.com.