First a red container rolls up to the previously prepped locale. Pop off the top & reveal everything needed – from fixtures to furniture – to set up an entire Puma concept store within a scant three days. And the coolest thing? The container itself then transforms into the checkout desk. "We needed to find a way to make the opening of a Puma store really easy, and the concept of a store arriving in a container was born," Antonio Bertone, Puma global director of brand management, told WWD. "The main idea is creating a fluid space in which all of Puma's ideas could be represented, so each store and each season will be different," explains Paolo Lucchetta of Italy’s Retail Design Srl, the designer behind this concept which has been in design development for about a year. Interestingly, while the look is "like a graphic, heavy loft," the existing space is left as is in an attempt to customize the Puma experience for that particular location. . "We got too polished and became too much of a retail machine," acknowledges Bertone. "You will see a brick wall — the shell is absolutely open with no plaster or outer skin," adds Lucchetta. "Every store will be an interaction between the space and the products." Similar to the company’s web site, each section of the store will be labeled with signs, such as "From the Puma Archives." "How do you bring the world of puma.com alive?" asks Bertone. "We are turning the Web site into a store, a church of Puma." Interestingly, this is the first time any of the 80 existing Puma concept stores have undergone any design changes since the first one was rolled out in 1999, and new concept stores will all follow this new store-in-a-box blueprint. It’s a clever mashup of the notion of mass production and customization; all the concept stores arrive with the same ingredients in the same standard red container, but leaving the existing space intact, creates a unique, customized experience that shoppers today have come to expect.

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