UNIQLO initially approached us to audit the store experience from a customer perspective, and identify opportunities for improvement. We were invited to present our (punchy) findings at the annual European Marketing Summit, which led to a deeper engagement with key stakeholders from marketing, merchandising, digital, and property teams.

Our collaboration culminated in a design workshop, where we focused on identifying and aligning around opportunities to radically transform the new Covent Garden store experience with digital. During the workshop, existing ideas were refined and new concepts were shaped and prioritised based on their potential to unlock business value.

The concepts we developed included a digitally enabled ‘product launchpad’ to showcase new or trending products, ‘store mode’ built into the existing app to provide customers with more product information, and a ‘maker-creator space’ to host live performances, talks, workshops, and open mics from local artists.

Through subsequent design sprints, we created prototypes to bring these concepts to life and developed test plans to validate them with customers at pace. As part of this work, we established experience principles to guide future development and set the UNIQLO team on an experiment-driven path of continuous improvement.