As more retailers turn their attention back to physical environments, the conversation has moved well beyond whether stores still matter. Of course they do. A physical retail environment is one of the most powerful brand experience tools a brand has – every material, every sightline, every spatial transition shapes how a customer feels, and feeling drives spending.
The more interesting question now is how retailers can use their first store not just as a market entry, but as a genuine laboratory: A place to test, learn, and build the intelligence that will shape a rollout of 10, 15, or 25 sites.
But there’s a distinction here that often gets lost in the excitement of opening day, and it’s one worth getting right, because it shapes everything that follows. A concept launch and a retail lab store are not the same thing, even though most retailers use the terms interchangeably. A concept launch is driven by commercial pressure – get it open, get it trading, make it look great for the PR moment. A lab store is a learning environment whose primary purpose isn’t revenue (though it can trade) but rather to test hypotheses, gather data, and iterate before committing at scale. A concept launch asks, “How do we make this amazing?” while a lab store asks, “What do we still not know, and what will it cost us if we get it wrong 25 times?”
Most retailers in Australia are doing something in between – a concept launch with some test-and-learn thinking layered on top. The customer journey gets observed, the merchandising gets tweaked, and lessons are noted. But the rigour of a true lab store, where every element is deliberately tested against a hypothesis, and the findings are systematically fed into the rollout program, remains rare. And even among retailers who do embrace that rigour, the testing almost always focuses on brand, customer experience, and merchandising. The way the store actually gets built – its construction, its manufacturing, its supply chain, its delivery model – is almost never part of the experiment.
The right people, at the right time
Retailers who invest in lab stores are typically rigorous, well-resourced, and thoughtful about their approach. The design and development phase leading up to a lab store can involve architects, brand strategists, visual merchandisers, and behavioural researchers, all working together to refine the concept before it goes live – and that work is often exceptional. Where things come unstuck is the sequencing.
The specialist delivery teams who will ultimately manage store development across the full rollout – and by store development I mean the entire discipline of turning a retail design into a physical, repeatable reality, encompassing construction, manufacturing coordination, procurement, supply chain management, program governance, and the site-by-site navigation of landlord requirements, base building conditions, centre management rules, and make-good obligations – typically don’t enter the picture until the lab store is already built and open. They arrive at the tender stage, inheriting a design that’s been validated for how it looks, how it feels, and how customers move through it, but never stress-tested for how it will actually be delivered, repeatedly, across 25 different sites with 25 different sets of constraints.
Most retailers are planning well. The missing piece is having the people responsible for delivering the next 25 stores in the room when the first one is being designed.
Why the sequencing defaults this way
The sequencing issue isn’t the result of poor process – it’s driven by something more instinctive.
Researchers studying elite soccer goalkeepers found something counterintuitive: During penalty kicks, goalkeepers consistently dive left or right, even though staying in the centre actually gives them the best statistical chance of making the save. The reason is that diving feels like doing something, while standing still feels like doing nothing, even when standing still is the smarter move. The researchers called it “action bias” – our deep, compulsive preference for visible action over strategic restraint.
Retail procurement follows the same pattern. Once a concept is validated in the lab store, the instinct is to move – document the design, package it for tender, let the market compete on price. Tendering feels decisive, it looks like good governance, and it keeps the program moving: Three quotes, competitive tension, the appearance of rigour. But what it actually does is push all the store development intelligence downstream to a point where acting on it becomes significantly more expensive, because the decisions that should have been informed by delivery expertise have already been locked in.
There’s a budget psychology that compounds this. Richard Thaler’s research on mental accounting explains why we instinctively compartmentalise costs into separate psychological categories, even when they’re drawing from the same pool. In retail rollout programs, this manifests clearly: Design costs and delivery costs almost always live in separate spreadsheets, get approved by different stakeholders, and feel like independent budgets. Nobody interrogates the disconnect until the two collide on-site and the per-store number stops making sense. When both sides of that equation are in the room together from the start, the number starts making sense, because the decisions being made during design are already informed by what delivery will actually cost.
And once the lab store is built, something else takes hold. Psychologists call it “status quo bias” – our tendency to treat existing conditions as the default, even when they haven’t been optimised. The lab store design becomes ‘the design’, and questioning whether a specification that worked in one store will hold across 25 feels like going backwards. Retailers lock in materials, construction methods, and fixture details that were validated for brand experience but never tested for manufacturability at volume, because revisiting them feels like undoing progress. The result is that avoidable costs get baked into the rollout program as permanent line items.
The bottom-line impact of these patterns is substantial. A bespoke joinery detail that costs $8000 in the lab store becomes a $200,000 line item across 25 sites. A lighting specification that requires overtime at every install inflates the per-store cost quietly across the entire program. A floor finish that needs three weeks to cure compresses every timeline it touches, pushing back trading dates and missing launch windows. None of these are problems with the design itself – they’re problems with when delivery expertise entered the conversation, and they compound with every store. By the time a retailer reaches store 10, the cumulative cost of decisions that were never stress-tested during design can represent a significant percentage of the total program budget – and the customer experience that was so carefully validated in the lab store starts to degrade as compromises are made to claw back time and cost.
What changes when the sequencing shifts
When specialist delivery teams are in the room during design and development, working alongside the architect and brand team before the lab store is built, the scope of testing widens considerably. Design decisions get informed by delivery reality in real time: A joinery detail that works beautifully in the lab store can be costed and tested for manufacturability before it becomes a cost driver at scale; a floor finish that needs three weeks to cure gets flagged before it compresses every subsequent program timeline; cost modelling is built from real build data rather than estimates. The concept being validated becomes the concept that can actually be delivered – not just the one that looks and feels right on opening day.
The delivery model itself also gets proven before it needs to perform. Questions like whether specified materials can be sourced at program volumes, what tenancy coordination looks like across different centre management regimes, and how construction sequencing will work within trading environments – these are the questions that derail rollout programs when they surface at store five. Answering them during the design and development phase, rather than discovering them under delivery pressure, means the operating system for the rollout is already calibrated by the time it needs to run.
There’s a sensory dimension here too that I think the industry underestimates. We don’t experience a retail environment through our eyes alone – we experience it through our bodies, through movement, touch, sound, the feel of materials underfoot, the weight of a door handle, the way light shifts through a space at different times of day. A render can’t capture that, and a mood board can’t replicate it. The physical lab store is where the brand experience becomes real – but it only becomes repeatable when the people who understand manufacturing, construction sequencing, and material behaviour at volume are part of that conversation from the beginning.
And then there’s the human infrastructure that underpins all of it. Retail delivery operates under a completely different set of conditions to commercial construction – you’re working inside someone else’s asset, under centre management rules, with trading neighbours, landlord approvals, and make-good obligations that change from site to site. Teams that have worked through ambiguity together during design and development consistently outperform those meeting for the first time under delivery pressure, because the relationships and trust built before the lab store opens become the operating system that carries you through rollout. Get the sequencing right, and the concept being validated is the concept that will actually be delivered – at scale, on brand, within budget, and with a customer experience that holds together from the first store to the 25th.
The bigger idea
Retailers have been using lab stores for years, and the brands that commit to them consistently outperform those that don’t. But most lab stores are only testing half the equation – they validate how the store looks, feels, and functions for the customer, and that work is essential, but they don’t test whether the experience can be replicated with the same quality, consistency, and commercial viability across an entire rollout program.
Closing that gap comes down to sequencing – getting the right people in the room at the right time, so that what gets designed is what gets built, and what gets built is what the customer actually experiences, every single time.
About the author: Paris Buckland-Young is the CEO at Storepro.
