The PUMA Store 2.0

It's over six years since we first helped PUMA turn their concept stores into a place where customers could experience the purest essence of the brand - a place where a projected cat roamed the store, where mannequins were freakily realistic and where changing rooms were transformed into unexpected environments. Back then it won us our first D&AD pencil and there were only a handful of stores.

Fast forward to today and there are over 250 stores, retail has caught up and budgets have got smaller! But PUMA's lost none of it's sense of fun, surprise and joy. So our brief was to build on the legacy we'd already started while making sure our ideas were 2011 friendly and could be rolled out to a hell of a lot of locations!

Working closely with Berlin based interior designers, Player & Franz and New York based digital creators, Dotglu, the new stores in Paris & Bejing see the first round of a number of in-store concepts aimed at bringing a little PUMA joy to customers.

At the PUMA store the emphasis is always on playfulness and we've used both high and low tech to achieve this. Concepts include an interactive iPad wall called the "PUMA Joy Pad" (it uses 32 connected iPads that play a whole load of interactive animations)...

...a suspended PUMA logo made of over 1000 white trainers,

a mysterious red cabinet called the PUMA 'peepshow' positioned in the changing rooms (which look and feel like bathrooms) that surprises the viewer with a string of tromp l'oeil, looped films each time a curious customer opens its door.

Else where, ambient film clips play on the ceiling and a red phone, labelled the "un-smart phone" plays offbeat phone messages to any customers who fancy picking up the receiver.

Outside the store, two virtual changing rooms (actually 4x46" LED screens bolted together) open their curtains every 30 seconds to reveal actual size models posing to the street in real time. The models hold their pose for 30 seconds at a time (we actually filmed them like this for real) occaisionally changing pose until the curtain shuts on them. Cheekily, the curtain often reopens to find the next model only half dressed, but then it it Paris after all.

The next stores are set to open in, Vienna, London, Prague, Shanghai, Santa Monica, New Delhi and Alto Las Cordes Chile later this year.