NIKE+ FUELSTATION
Imagine being immersed into an interactive, digital experience when you go shopping. Nike’s new conceptual store in London’s Boxpark pop-up mall is the first of its kind and may just be the future of retail.
Video: Introducing Nike+ FuelStation
The sports brand opened the Nike+FuelStation to coincide with the future launch of the Nike+ FuelBand, a device that tracks your movements, including the steps you’ve taken, the workouts you’ve completed and the calories you’ve managed to burn up throughout the day.
The store features some of Nike’s products, but that is only just a small part of the experience. The retail space breaks new boundaries in digital displays and design, and aims to appeal to today’s digitally-enabled athlete. It features a seamless mix of innovative digital services and physical consumer experiences including motion sensing, LED walls, augmented reality tools and interactive touchscreens which provide consumers with information products and services.
The moment you step through the door of the FuelStation, a camera tracks your movements, turning a red interactive wall green. Other features of the store include digital mannequins, which have motion sensitive intelligent mirrors that reveal film footage of local runners wearing key products from the store.
There is also the Nike ‘Fuel Pod’, which is a motion sensitive installation where customers see a life-sized, digitalised reflection on an LCD wall that reacts to movement to create an impressive piece of digital art. Created in partnership with AKQA, London, it is powered by Microsoft Kinect and is designed to let you record yourself dancing, jumping and generally being active. The Kinect tracks your movements and recreates the silhouette made of thousands of pixels on the wall that go from red to green based on the amount of movement.
Another pod features a treadmill and a series of cameras which record you running and then sends this information to a store adviser’s tablet (all staff carry an iPad around with them) for feedback on how you run.
Designed entirely in-house by the Nike Brand Design team, the store mixes futuristic interior design and architecture with features inspired by the first ever Nike store, which opened in Portland in 1973. Just like the original store, Nike+FuelStation at Boxpark features the iconic ‘chevron’ shaped bleacher wall coverings that have been given a modern twist with embedded LCD ‘counting’ numbers replacing the hand painted digits seen on the originals.
“Nike+ products and services have merged the physical and digital worlds to help inspire and enable athletes of all levels to be the best they can be,” says Global Creative Director, Andy Walker.
“Now we’re taking this approach one step further by combining innovative products with digital services and interactive multimedia experiences to create a state-of-the-art retail environment.”
Boxpark mall located in Shoreditch, London, is an innovation itself. It’s made from stripped and refitted shipping containers and stores can fill one or more of these containers (in the case of Nike it is spread across four). These ‘box shops’ are designed to be low cost and low risk and are the world’s first ‘pop-up mall’ – so named because its basic building blocks are inherently moveable – they can and will probably, literally pop up anywhere in the world.
Image: Nike+ Fuelstation
Video: Nike+ Fuelstation's motion sensitive 'Fuel Pod' in action. Courtesy of AndyandCallum.co.uk
