Walk into an Aesop store anywhere in the world and something happens before you even look at a product. The space itself tells you a story. The materials - raw concrete, dark timber, apothecary-style sinks - communicate a philosophy before a single word is spoken. The amber bottles lined up in precise rows. The warm lighting. The deliberate absence of anything that screams "this is a shop." You aren't browsing a retail space. You're entering a world that someone has thought about deeply, down to the temperature of the water in the basins. That isn't commerce. That is theatre.
And it's the difference between a shop that sells things and a shop that means something. A difference that most retailers still don't understand, even as their footfall numbers tell them everything they need to know about what happens when you treat a physical space as merely a place to put products.
I've been thinking about this a lot lately - the relationship between physical retail and design, between shopping and experience, between a transaction and a feeling. It started with Modern Retro, the project where I reimagine modern brands as 1970s retail stores. But the deeper I went into that project, the more I realised that what I was really exploring wasn't nostalgia. It was the theatre of retail itself. The idea that a shop is, at its best, a stage. And the products aren't the show - the space is.
The Supreme model
Consider Supreme. Whatever you think about the brand - and opinions are strong in every direction - you can't deny that their retail strategy is one of the most deliberate design decisions in modern commerce. The stores are small. Deliberately small. There isn't much stock. The staff are famously unhelpful. The experience of shopping there's, by any traditional retail metric, terrible. And yet people queue around the block.
Why? Because Supreme understood something that most retailers have not figured out: scarcity is a design choice. The small store isn't a limitation - it is the concept. The sparse inventory isn't bad management - it is curation. The entire retail experience is engineered to create a feeling of exclusivity, urgency, and cultural belonging. You aren't buying a t-shirt. You're buying membership in a scene. And the physical space - its size, its attitude, its deliberate friction - is what sells that membership.
Drop culture, the model Supreme popularised, is fundamentally theatrical. It has a schedule. It has anticipation. It has a queue that functions as an audience line. It has a reveal - the moment you see what is available. And it has scarcity - the knowledge that if you don't act now, the show is over. This is West End drama applied to commerce, and it works because it treats shopping as an event rather than a transaction.
Aesop's quiet revolution
At the other end of the spectrum from Supreme's controlled chaos is Aesop's quiet revolution. Where Supreme creates urgency, Aesop creates calm. Where Supreme's design language says "you're lucky to be here," Aesop's says "you deserve to take your time." But both are doing the same thing. Both are using physical space as a medium for brand storytelling. Both understand that the shop isn't where the product lives - it's where the brand lives.
What makes Aesop remarkable is that every single store is different. Not slightly different - fundamentally different. Each location is designed in response to its neighbourhood, its building, its local materials and cultural context. The store in Melbourne looks nothing like the store in Soho, which looks nothing like the store in Kyoto. And yet they all feel unmistakably like Aesop. This is art direction at the highest level - creating a consistent identity through a system rather than through repetition.
Most brands do the opposite. They create one store design and replicate it everywhere. The same fixtures, the same layout, the same experience whether you're in London or Lagos. This is efficient but soulless. It treats physical space as a container rather than a canvas. Aesop treats each store as a new production of the same play - same script, same spirit, different staging. Every location is an interpretation, not a copy.
The corner shop that gets it
You don't need a global brand and an architecture budget to make retail theatrical. Some of the best retail experiences I've encountered are tiny, independent, and operating on budgets that wouldn't cover Aesop's annual candle spend. But they understand the principle. They understand that how something is presented is as important as what is being presented.
There's a corner shop near me in London - I won't name it because the queue is already long enough - that sells essentially the same things as every other corner shop. Milk, bread, snacks, newspapers. But the owner has curated the space with an eye that most creative directors would envy. The newspaper display is arranged by design quality, not circulation. The snack selection is edited - not everything, but the right things. The lighting is warm. The music is considered. Walking in feels like visiting someone's home rather than popping into a convenience store.
That shop does more business than any of its neighbours. Not because the products are better. Because the experience is better. Because someone cared about the space and that care is visible in every detail. That's the retail theatre principle in its purest form. You don't need a huge budget. You need taste.
What Modern Retro taught me
When I started building Modern Retro, I thought I was making a nostalgia project. I was taking modern brands - Spotify, Tesla, Oatly, Supreme itself - and imagining what they would look like as 1970s retail stores. Wood panelling. Orange price tags. Flickering fluorescent tubes. Cash registers instead of self-checkout. It was meant to be playful. And it is playful. But it also taught me something I didn't expect.
It taught me that the 1970s retail aesthetic worked because it was honest. The materials were real - actual wood, actual metal, actual paper. The signage was hand-painted. The displays were physical objects arranged by human hands. There was no algorithm deciding what to show you. There was a shopkeeper who knew their stock and arranged it with intention. The theatre of 1970s retail was a human theatre. The stage was set by people for people, and you could feel that humanity in the space.
Modern retail has lost that humanity. The Apple Store is beautiful but sterile. The Amazon Go store is efficient but soulless. Even the stores that try to create experience - the experiential flagships with their Instagram moments and digital installations - often feel like they're performing humanity rather than expressing it. They're sets rather than stages. The difference matters.
Taste as retail strategy
This connects directly to something I've been exploring with Taste OS - the idea that taste isn't just a personal quality but a strategic tool. In retail, taste is everything. It's what separates the corner shop I described from the one next door. It's what separates Aesop from The Body Shop. It's what separates a vintage market stall that draws a crowd from the one that sits empty.
Taste in retail manifests as curation - what you choose to stock, how you choose to display it, and crucially, what you choose not to stock. The empty shelf space is as important as the full shelf space. The product you decided not to carry is as much a design decision as the product you did. Every great retail space is defined as much by its absences as its presences. Supreme doesn't carry everything. Aesop doesn't make everything. The corner shop near me doesn't stock everything. And that restraint - that editorial judgment - is what makes the experience feel considered rather than chaotic.
This is the lesson that e-commerce has mostly failed to learn. Online, the instinct is to stock everything, show everything, recommend everything. The infinite shelf. But the infinite shelf is the opposite of theatre. Theatre requires a stage, and a stage requires boundaries. You can't perform in an infinite space. You need walls, wings, and a deliberate decision about what the audience sees and what stays hidden. The best physical retail still understands this. And that's why, despite everything, walking into a great shop still feels fundamentally different from scrolling through a great website.
The curtain rises every time a door opens. The question is whether anyone has bothered to direct the show.
