paris

Etam Summer Club: A Parisian flagship store takes to the seaside

3 June 2026 by Flora

As part of our retail tours, the Lemens & Partners team observed a retail activation at the Etam Haussmann flagship store in Paris.

Visible from dozens of metres away on the street, it’s hard to miss. Etam has transformed its Paris flagship store into a veritable summer retreat with its Summer Club, a kiosk set up overnight, both in the shop window and inside the store.

Blue and white stripes, a customised Fiat 500, a map of the Côte d’Azur stretching from Marseille to Monaco, and a life-size beach hut. You’re not just walking into a shop, you’re setting off for the South.

The Summer Club doesn’t just sell swimwear. It sells the promise of a holiday. And it all begins long before you step inside the shop.

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Photo 2 : etam-summer-club-cabine-plage-interieur-magasin

Retail tours have become essential for tracking trends, innovating and drawing inspiration. Lemens & Partners analyses global retail movements through the lens of your strategic challenges, observing what works elsewhere to help shape the retail of tomorrow.

We design and lead bespoke retail tours with our international experts. The field is an endless source of ideas.

Get in touch to organise your next retail tour.

BONBONBON Bonduelle

26 May 2026 by Flora

How do you reinvent a product that’s already sitting in almost everyone’s cupboard? Bonduelle’s answer, turn it into a pop-up experience that’s colourful, playful, and surprisingly cool. After testing the concept with a first street-side shop in Villeneuve-d’Ascq last year, the brand brought its cheerful green universe to the heart of Paris this spring.

Part grocery shop, part restaurant, part creative experience, the Bonduelle BONBONBON Pop-Up gives visitors a fresh way to look at canned and preserved foods. Styled like a fun little “supermarket,” the space mixes iconic products with newly launched ranges, while showing just how versatile these everyday staples can be.

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And the real surprise? You can actually taste everything on site. The restaurant area serves freshly prepared dishes inspired by street-food culture, transforming humble canned vegetables into colourful, flavour-packed creations that feel anything but ordinary.

It’s a playful reminder that even the most familiar cupboard essentials can still surprise you.

We design and lead bespoke retail tours with our international experts. The field is an endless source of ideas.

Get in touch to organise your next retail tour.

Prada Beauty & The Ordinary at the entrances of Galeries Lafayette

22 May 2026 by Flora

As part of our retail tours, the Lemens & Partners team visited Galeries Lafayette Haussmann during the “Quelles Beautés!” operation. Two pop-ups, two entrances, two radically opposing universes and yet, a remarkably similar message.

Galeries Lafayette Paris Haussmann has inaugurated the largest beauty space in France. In this spirit, the GL launched the Quelles Beautés! operation, running until May 31st 2026. Transforming the store into a creative platform for brands. Two of them were each given an entrance of their own: Prada Beauty and The Ordinary. Two entirely different retail languages, and yet a shared objective.

The Prada Beauty Market

Light wooden crates, fresh fruit, a yellow and white striped awning, springtime market furniture. Prada Beauty chose to make itself accessible in the most literal sense by installing a Spring Market. After a first installation in the 7th arrondissement from 4th to 10th May, the concept moved to Galeries Lafayette Haussmann until May 31st.

The Spring Market humanises the brand, makes it tactile, seasonal, almost familiar. The scenography does what the product alone cannot: it shifts perception.

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The Ordinary Pop-Up

On the other side, The Ordinary plays the opposite hand. Chrome pedestals, oversized packaging, a laboratory atmosphere all to present the new Volufiline 92% + Pal-Isoleucine 1% serum. A brand born online, built on transparency and fair pricing, now giving itself a physical presence.

The scenography makes no attempt to imitate luxury. Instead, it asserts a different form of desirability: that of proven efficacy, framed within a resolutely scientific identity.

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Prada humanises itself to move closer to the consumer. The Ordinary theatricalises itself to speak to the consumer differently. In both cases, it is the scenography that does the work of perceptual repositioning not the product, not the price.

Designing these spaces requires profiles capable of thinking simultaneously about brand strategy, scenography and the visitor’s emotional experience. Talent at the intersection of several disciplines, and increasingly at the heart of the recruitment missions we lead.

We design and lead bespoke retail tours with our international experts. The field is an endless source of ideas.

Get in touch to organise your next retail tour.

Massimo Dutti in Paris: a pop-up as a way of life

24 April 2026 by Flora

From 17 to 27 April 2026, Spanish brand Massimo Dutti opened an ephemeral pop-up at 7 rue Froissart, in the 3rd arrondissement of Paris. A space visited by the Lemens & Partners team as part of our retail tours.

Far more than a boutique

This is not a conventional ready-to-wear pop-up. It is a living space, considered in every detail, where fashion, design, a bookshop and a café coexist naturally.

The Limited Edition collection, an embodiment of Quiet Luxury, unfolds within a calm and refined environment. The garments, predominantly in shades of white and beige, echo the Pantone Colour of the Year 11-4201 Cloud Dancer. A visual coherence that is anything but accidental.

A space designed as a gallery

Throughout the visit, the eye is drawn to design objects and furniture carefully selected from the Jacques Lacoste and Patrick Seguin galleries. Pieces that speak just as eloquently as the clothes themselves.

A library space, created in collaboration with the Yvon Lambert bookshop, punctuates the journey with art and architecture titles. A discreet café corner completes the picture, in partnership with Café Nuances, known for their matcha and their four Parisian addresses.

The floral compositions by designer Nina Charles provide the final touch: something living, something sensorial, something organic within a very considered space.

The privilege of the ephemeral

What makes this pop-up so effective is the feeling it creates in the visitor. The sense of being somewhere accessible only for a matter of days, offering pieces that are near impossible to find elsewhere. A limited product, in a limited-time setting, it is an equation that generates desire naturally.

What this tells us about the future of retail

This pop-up illustrates a trend we observe increasingly on our retail tours: brands seeking to move upmarket are no longer doing so solely through price or product, but through the environment they build around them. Choosing one’s partners, a bookshop, a gallery, a coffee roaster, a floral designer, is itself an act of positioning.

To conceive this kind of experience, you need creative profiles capable of thinking well beyond the garment. Art directors, scenographers, retail managers with a genuine culture of design. The kind of talent we help find every day.

We design and lead bespoke retail tours with our international experts. The field is an endless source of ideas.

Get in touch to organise your next retail tour.

Lacoste Polo Factory: when a garment becomes more than a product

22 April 2026 by Flora

Located on the Champs-Élysées, the Lacoste Polo Factory stages the “manufacturing secrets” of the iconic polo shirt. As part of our retail tours, the Lemens & Partners team visited the Lacoste flagship on the Champs-Élysées.

Heritage at the heart of the scenography

It all begins with one iconic garment: the L.12.12 polo shirt, created in 1933 by René Lacoste. For over 90 years, it has remained fundamentally unchanged. And it is precisely on this permanence that Lacoste builds its story. The polo is displayed as one would frame a great athlete’s shirt protected, carefully spotlit, and treated as a piece of heritage in its own right.

Around it, the scenography unfolds the behind-the-scenes of its creation: design sketches, production stages, material selection.

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Personalisation as an extension of the experience

Through the My Lacoste Customisation service, each visitor can personalise their polo shirt on the spot : colour choice, crocodile style, embroidered initials. The piece is made in front of you and ready to collect on the same day. You do not leave with a standard product. You leave with something entirely unique, with the distinct feeling of having co-created it yourself.

It is a simple but powerful promise: turning a purchase into a personal and singular experience.

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Community as a driver of loyalty

Lacoste takes this thinking even further with its members programme. Lacoste accessories and products, exclusive benefits, a personalisable polo, reserved surprises, being a Lacoste member means accessing a different kind of relationship with the brand, one that is made tangible inside the store itself.

What Lacoste has understood is this: loyalty cannot be bought. It is built.

What this tells us about the future of retail

The Polo Factory is not a one-off concept Lacoste is rolling it out across its flagships worldwide. Transparency around craftsmanship, heritage brought to life, product personalisation, community activated in-store: these are the levers that brands wishing to remain desirable must master today. And to do so, choosing the right creative talent has become indispensable.

We design and lead bespoke retail tours with our international experts. The field is an endless source of ideas.

Get in touch to organise your next retail tour.

The Carwalk Renault: a tool for fostering emotional connection.

17 April 2026 by Flora

Open until 9 June, the Carwalk Renault has taken up residence on the Champs-Élysées as a hybrid space combining exhibition, dining and retail. The Lemens & Partners team visited the venue as part of their retail tours.

As soon as you enter, the space makes a striking impression with its sheer scale. Spanning several floors, the brand presents a vision it describes as a « visionary concept ».

First and foremost, the exhibition showcases a number of iconic models. The Renault Twingo, conceived in collaboration with Sabine Marcelis, a Dutch artist and designer, created in 2023 to celebrate the model’s 30th anniversary. Or the Renault Suite N° 4, designed with French designer Mathieu Lehanneur, a nomadic car conceived in the spirit of a hotel suite. Two collaborations that say a great deal about how Renault views its own brand culture.

The layout of the space naturally guides you towards the café-restaurant, then on to an area dedicated to the works of Icelandic painter Erro Gudmundur. This collaborative project with the brand reinterprets automotive culture through Renault models using pop art figures. The top floor is dedicated to relaxation: vinyl records to listen to and free-to-play arcade machines offer a leisurely way to round off your visit.

The brand’s latest models are on display throughout the exhibition, but never in an intrusive way. And for those who’d like to take home a souvenir, The Originals Store offers accessories, toys, clothing, miniatures and even a Renault-branded coffee machine.

Le Défilé Renault - Retail Tour - Lemens & Partners

Renault isn’t trying to sell cars here, at least not directly. The Carwalk Renault is, above all, a tool for building an emotional connection. People stay there, linger there, and come back. And that is precisely where the brand gains something far more lasting than a simple transaction: it gains the visitor’s emotional attachment to the brand.

By showcasing its heritage through artistic collaborations and iconic models, Renault is transforming retail into a canvas for expression. Pop Art meets automotive culture, the showroom becomes a gallery, and the brand leaves a lasting impression on visitors that goes far beyond the product itself.

This sends a strong signal to all brands wondering about the future of their physical retail operations.

We design and lead bespoke retail tours with our international experts. The field is an endless source of ideas.

Get in touch to organise your next retail tour.

Etam Summer Club: A Parisian flagship store takes to the seaside

BONBONBON Bonduelle

Massimo Dutti in Paris: a pop-up as a way of life

Lacoste Polo Factory: when a garment becomes more than a product

The Carwalk Renault: a tool for fostering emotional connection.

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