Last week, I joined many of retail and design’s biggest names for this year’s Creative Retail Awards in London.

I’m not going to list all of the winners (because the list is here) or even my specific favourites. What I can say is that deciding on a winner for each category was clearly a tough job (so I’m glad it was our Head of Trends Jack Stratten who was on the judging panel rather than me).

In a world where retail design seems to be going all in on premiumisation by way of minimalism and beige, it’s nice to be reminded about all of the creative retail spaces that exist as well.

It’s also not a case of form over function. These aren’t designs that are just wacky or interesting or different for the sake of it. They are the results of teams who know a brand and their customer really well.

More than that though, every nominee was a reminder of what the superpower of the store actually is.

Full immersion

From the beautiful Emerald Theatre setting to the range of cabaret-style entertainment, the Creative Retail Awards themselves are a microcosm of what’s great about physical retail.

Too many industry awards are bland – dare I say, boring – events which feel largely indistinguishable from each other. But, as I watched a man balance a stack of chairs on champagne bottles and sit on top, I felt fully immersed in this world for the night.

And judging by the number of people who stayed after the awards to fill up the dancefloor, this was an environment that people weren’t in a rush to leave.

The best physical retail stores are exactly the same – they immerse you in a world and create an environment that you want to be in.

That superpower is something that digital retail can’t touch.

Physical retail shouldn’t try to emulate e-commerce

Websites – by and large – are all the same in terms of look and feel. Strip out the branding and individual products and you’d struggle to tell one from another.

This is the result of endless optimisation over years – constant tweaking to improve user experience and smooth out any rough edges where a customer might potentially trip and drop off.

Everyone is looking at the same data metrics and adapting to push a tiny percentage improvement. And this approach makes sense given that at any moment customers can just bounce to a competitor.

The problem is that physical retail seems to be going down the same path – optimising based on data and adopting a minimalist approach that often ends up flattening everything. But there’s no need for stores to follow such rigid design parameters, because a store isn’t a website.

The store is a place of entertainment and inspiration, not just a sales journey. It’s ok for it to have a bit of personality, if only to remind consumers that your company has such a thing when they’re sitting and scrolling through page after page of near-identical online results.

You don’t immerse someone in your world or tell them your story or make them feel something by making the in-store experience an ever-faster process of getting the customer to the checkout. Because at that point, they might as well just buy online.

The store has to offer more because it has the power to offer more. It has the power to excite and interest and be different.

Win or lose, all the nominees at this year’s Creative Retail Awards embody that. Long may it continue.