A telecommunications brand’s store is out to make an impression along with a sale

This is the third installment of our series about the state of store design today. Click here to read more.

Since the height of the pandemic, when e-commerce exploded, there has been much gnashing of teeth about the future of brick-and-mortar stores. With e-commerce so convenient and—let’s use one of retail’s favorite buzzwords—frictionless, what could lure shoppers off their couches?

In London, one answer to how to get consumers to leave their homes is a store that demonstrates how those homes can be more technologically sophisticated.

EE, one of the UK’s largest telecommunications companies, opened a new flagship in 2023 in the Westfield London shopping center in the capital’s White City district. Mobile carriers and internet service providers, like Verizon and Comcast on US shores, tend to be boutique-sized, which is plenty of space to show the latest phone models and accessories, but the new store occupies 4,230 square feet of space.

More than just showcasing products, it functions in some ways like a science museum, with what the brand calls “experience zones” that essentially are interactive exhibits. Each evokes a different room of the home and demonstrates how technology could transform those rooms.

Richard Bennett, creative director at London’s Dalziel & Pow, which designed EE Studio in collaboration with Your Studio, explained that the store was designed to be an “experiential platform” to tell a “connected home technology story.”

Bennett said stores need to embrace such trends as storytelling and experiential design to engage consumers.

“Stores that were all about getting stuff—having things on shelves available to me so that I could go and pick it up when I needed—they became irrelevant because you don’t need that anymore,” Bennett told Retail Brew.

Hammering it home: EE Studio’s kitchen display is filled with smart appliances including a refrigerator with a screen that reveals its contents without opening the door, and from which groceries can be added to shopping lists and ordered using voice commands.

A kid’s bedroom showcases products that are both educational and safeguard them when they’re online, while sets of a living room and home office demonstrate the technological future for those parts of the home.

“You can start to understand what a connected home is,” Bennett said. “What it means, what do I need? How do I build it?”

In another area, shoppers can play video games and, if they need to wind down after all that mayhem, head to the digital spa, an immersive environment that surrounds them with footage and audio of beautiful natural environments.

“Bright lighting, noise and an abundance of visual stimuli can lead to retail exhaustion,” Rachel Lloyd, digital experience director of YourStudio, told Amsterdam-based design publication Frame. ‘“For the EE digital spa, our goal was to provide a moment for shoppers to slow their pace, providing a moment of calm reflection and digitally enabled recharge.”

Less is store: While the staff in the store assist consumers visiting for a repair or making a purchase, Bennett described them more like brand ambassadors than sales clerks.

“It’s really about falling in love with the products and having a great time and a great experience,” he said.

One indication that EE was thinking counterintuitively about the flagship is that the company decided not to call it a store but rather a studio.

“We did go through some other alternatives for what it could be called as well,” Bennett said. “But we all felt ‘studio’ felt like it was active. You were doing something, you were participating, there was something going on.”