Designing Retail: Nike Stadium

It's common for Nike Stadium locations, such as this one in London, to invite basketball or soccer athletes to speak directly with customers. Retailers hope that providing a theater-like space for community performances or Nike-sponsored chats will engage visitors more effectively than a conventional retail space.

Rafael de Cardenas says the concept of design and social interaction as a retail trend has caught on as brands try to establish “cultural relevance.” He says that retail spaces that include collaborative design and instill an attitude without “force-feeding cool,” prove the most successful. Here in Paris (not designed by de Cardenas), the ever-changing space looks much less like retail and more like a downtown experience.

Nike Stadium space offers a series of programming set in tandem with the sporting calendar as shown in the Milan location. Merging the idea of creating products and viewing sport, all with bolts of color, plays out well in this location.

For a stadium space to be successful, the community must get involved. “Rather than thinking of the stadium's store zone as a retail apparel space, we looked at typologies that spoke more to socialization,” de Cardenas says. Using a material palette of pegboard, gaffers tape, and plywood made it easy to convert the space from event to event. Bowery Stadium has taken on a variety of new permutations since de Cardenas first touched it—which was exactly the intention. Fast Company covered the space when it opened in 2010. Read their story here.

The bare-bones framework of many of the stadium spaces, like the white- and black-clad London location, gives each “refresh” the ability to create a specific look for a specific time, without requiring major overhauls.

Creative workshops allow youngsters a chance to explore art and gives Nike a way to market product. Nike allows visitors to the locations to customize products in a way not otherwise possible. By offering a different set of materials than what's available to the greater public, visitors feel they have ownership in the retail experience, as seen here in Milan.

Bowery Stadium’s current “refresh” includes a push of Nike’s Flyknit running shoe. Over the summer of 2012, the New York City site will host three community workshops with local architect and Cornell University researcher Jenny Sabin to explore the artistry of Flyknit products. By harnessing the bright, neon colors popular in today’s footwear, the space was reinvented to familiarize potential customers with the materials' performance aspects.