ABOUT

In 2015 we created a first of its kind digital retail experience for Sun and Sand Sports, a leading multi-sport retailer in the UAE, producing a state-of-the-art flagship store in the world’s largest retail destination, the Dubai Mall.

Recursive was asked to lead the digital design and implementation in a tight four-month timescale, working with Green Room Design. The brief from the Client was to feature digital in the customer journey at every level, creating a seamless experience between the web and physical store.

A key part of the brief was the concept of technology as an enabler for a personalised customer experience, available through browser podiums, interactive changing rooms, mobile apps, and also gait analysis. At the centre of the store there needed to be three sporting experiences to allow users to fully trial product from leading sporting brands. Every digital element of the store required development from scratch. Nothing that was created had ever been attempted before and therefore the risks were high. All elements needed to interact on a common software platform, making use of existing back end corporate software solutions such as the Product Information Database (PIM) alongside the stock room database to leverage the available data in real-time.

Social Media was at the heart of the store experience, which meant direct integration with Instagram, Facebook and Twitter on a store level, something social media platforms are not designed to do.

DEVELOPMENT:
Recursive designed the customer-facing technology elements throughout the store, including immersive trial zone areas for football, basketball and running using a combination of the physical and the virtual all tied into live social media coverage. Touchscreens at the entrance for each trial zone collect customer details. The touchscreen PCs communicate with the trial zone PCs to inform them that a customer has requested to use the zone, upon which the trial zone interactive begins. Touchscreens were also rolled out in the form of browser podiums and buying guides which are distributed across the store to provide customers with a guide to Sun and Sand’s range.

The Recursive team built a mock-up of the store’s trial zone space consisting of one complete physical environment to allow trialling of the technologies from all three zones in order to test and define the performance of the hardware against the needs of the software. As the experiences needed to be entirely automonous from the user’s perspective, this process took many months of user testing to ensure that the experiences were self-explanatory to a new user and that the scoring process was accurate.

RESULTS:
The results have outperformed the initial expectations. There were 11,255 users of the trail zones recorded in the first two months. 43% of these shared their trial zone experiences via social media leading to a huge online presence direct from the store activities.

The Sun and Sands store in the Dubai Mall has gone on to be cited by many other global retailers as a benchmark in digital engagement, leading to further development projects for the Recursive team with other core global brands such as Adidas and Puma.