Forget shopping at the mall—NYC has much more theatrical shopping experiences at secret mansions in the city this summer.
Wayne Enterprises Experience is an invite-only ultra luxury experience that takes place at an undisclosed location between June 3–10. While we cannot tell you where it’ll happen, we can tell you what to expect. Think multiple stories of carefully curated luxury products displayed in the most grand fashion, all part of an immersive experience designed to echo…Bruce Wayne. And yes, we do mean Batman’s billionaire civilian alter ego.
Produced and curated by Warner Brothers Discovery Global Consumer Products and Relevance International’s Brand Experience & Partnerships, the experience is built around personas of film and pop cultural icons. For now, the pop cultural icon is Bruce Wayne, who inspired the event that comes with some of the top brands in tech, automobiles, art, watercraft, and even residences.
“We have a blank canvas to create experiences…It’s not just obtaining what you’re purchasing; you’re actually getting to make a memory as you do it. And then you’re also having access to really cool things,” Suzanne Rosnowski, CEO and founder of Relevance International, told Retail Brew. “The idea is that retail has evolved and has to evolve, and we’ve got an issue of going to shopping centers…and a lot of unused space in the real estate space, like commercial space, residential space.”
Batman begins: Those “cool things” include items like watches by Kross Studio and exclusively designed cars by Automobili Pininfarina. There is also an accompanying website, BruceWayneX.com, that has many of these items on sale and open to anyone, but might specifically appeal to Batman fans.
“If you look at sites like shop the scene, it’s similar; it’s only online,” Rosnowski said. “This is melding the worlds [where] you want to live, dress, and be like a character, and you have the opportunity to have a themed shopping experience.”
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She added that all the products and brands have been curated by Relevance and Warners Bros to make sure they’re “on character,” and they’ve also hired actors to be present at the location to take you through the “story.”
“You are led by the actors, floor by floor and it’s explained what Bruce does there, and it’s sort of all laid out for you in a way that is compelling and feels natural,” Rosnowski added.
While there are possible plans to expand the shopping universe to include other pop cultural icons, the question is: Why was Bruce Wayne the starting point?
“[Bruce Wayne] represents the best of everything as a character and so he really naturally made sense for a luxury experience because he represents luxury,” Rosnowski explained.
Open invite: Still, the experience which per Rosnowski has been years in the making is not necessarily just for Batman fans.
“We’re cross-pollinating luxury brands in a way that creates a bit of a marketplace,” she said. “For example, the car brand might not have ever been exposed to the artist’s audience, and vice versa…It creates a bit of a new market for some of the brands within the house.”
And for those of us who don’t get the exclusive invite, there is always the website, which will continually drop new products throughout 2024 and is also set up to be an immersive online experience. So you still get a taste of the IRL event, which Rosnowski said is not necessarily limited to NYC.
“These experiences could pop up anywhere,” she said.
Update 6/3/2024: This story has been updated to clarify the collaborative aspects that produced this experiential campaign.