CornerShop
A Testing Ground for
the Future of Retail
Inspiring tomorrow’s shopping innovations
Testing new ideas
The world of retailing is facing fundamental transformation: increasingly digital, consumers expect their purchases to be enabled by seamless tech and underpinned by people and planet friendly principles.
To help our retail clients thrive in this evolving context, we have put our experience and capabilities together to design and launch a new hybrid retail experience and innovation concept store: CornerShop.
Founded in 2021, CornerShop is named after the tradition of British corner shops. Small stores, often found in neighborhood junctions, typical corner shops sell refreshments and essential goods. But in a break from tradition, frog’s CornerShop functions as a testing ground for the most innovative ideas in the world of retail.
The result of an ongoing collaboration with The Drum, CornerShop is a pop-up store located in London where we transform retail shopping and customer engagement to bring to life the store of tomorrow. It represents our shared commitment to exploring and testing brand new ways to shop, engage and build loyalty.
The physical retail environment presents a challenge to a fast-paced and iterative innovation process. Reputational, operational and technology challenges result in a failsafe approach where traditional approaches—such as designating an existing store as an 'innovation store'—get stuck in the managing the risk, cost and complexity of testing in full live stores, preventing many concepts and prototypes from ever being put in front of real customers. CornerShop is our way of sidestepping these issues, and going further into tomorrow’s retail innovations.
As a pop-up, live retail space, we open to the public for limited periods to listen and learn from un-biased, un-filtered and honest reactions. We gather insights into how people really feel about our experiences and the innovative technology that enables them. We learn what really works in the real world.
CornerShop not only enables retailers and brands to ideate and test tomorrow’s shopping innovations, but also supports our clients to gain that all-important consumer feedback—from real customers in the heart of London.
Digital innovation continues to unfold new ways to evolve the customer experience, improve in-store operations and enable consumers to rediscover the joy of in-person retail. CornerShop is a path for our clients to embody the cutting-edge of retail.
CornerShop enables us to take risks and learn how new experiences and technologies work outside the lab context—all with less expense and complexity than testing in a full store
From initial idea to super scale
How CornerShop solves the retail innovation pain points
For those seeking to innovate in retail, the initial exploration phase generally happens in a lab before moving to pilot stores and then, if all goes well in the lab and pilot phases, it’s time to scale across network.
But this traditional approach to retail innovation, though tried-and-tested, doesn’t necessarily offer the best environment for testing.
CornerShop can be utilized in the retail innovation process between labs and pilots—before ideas and technologies are ready to be dropped on a real shop floor.
It can be costly and time-consuming getting things ready to be tested in early stages in a real store. Without something like CornerShop many concepts either never make it to the shop floor, or when they do they cannot evolve and iterate at the pace required. This can result in concepts not functioning as intended and considerable collateral damage.
Lab testing
CornerShop
Pilot Stores
Scale
Accelerating positive innovation
Project highlights
Challenge
Striving for change
The increasing acceleration of technology and consumer’s demand for more from their instore experiences is forcing retailers and brands to strive for increasingly innovative ways to engage with their customers. We wanted to find a way to help our clients take risks.
Solution
Taking risks
In a retail context, taking risks means rapid test and learn cycles, as well as identifying strong signals to give the confidence to move new ideas and technologies faster through the innovation funnel. CornerShop is a pop-up retail space solution that enables us to play safely with risk.
Outcome
Open for business
Since we first opened our doors, we’ve helped clients understand consumer needs by testing and learning across multiple live pop-ups, imagining and building and testing unique experiences—ranging from true frictionless shopping to connected packaging and clothing.
CornerShop is a safe and flexible environment for real-world testing where we can validate learnings and iterate fast.
CornerShop is a safe and flexible environment for real-world testing where we can validate learnings and iterate fast.
CornerShop leverages technology to enable customers to discover, compare and purchase in interactive ways.
What we're learning
Five concepts we have tested in Cornershop
Over the course of numerous live pop-ups, we have tested and iterated over 30 new experiences and technologies.
Here are five of the best concepts that we believe signal tomorrow’s shopping:
1. AI-enabled store staff
Our world-first POV enhances an in-store headset with a generative assistant. Aiding store managers and shop floor staff as they assist customers, troubleshoot issues and complete tasks, the headset upends traditional training models by providing on-demand support.
Tech: GenAI
3. Sustainability via Dynamic Pricing
Following our belief that technology can help minimize food waste, we ran an experiment using AI-based pricing that calculated the peak pricing for perishable products and tied this into real-time screen media to promote to customers.
Tech: Electronic Shelf Labels, AI Time and Price Optimization
5. Generative targeted in-store media
We’re developing real-time, contextualized marketing that can be delivered at optimized moments to relevant audiences on in-store media. Leveraging GenAI to overcome complex business rules and workflows, it enables next-gen personalized experiences.
Tech: Bluetooth Proximity, GenAI
2. Functional AR
Our AR POV helps consumers navigate the complexity of shopping with purpose. In a test that proved incredibly popular with consumers, AR was overlaid onto shelving in which products are compatible with their specific shopping goals.
Tech: AR, PIM
4. Next-gen conversational commerce
We have developed and tested a personalized and convenient solution that leverages GenAI to provide customers with meal inspiration, based on real-time availability of stock in-store, and populates their reserve and collect baskets accordingly.
Tech: GenAI, Composable Commerce
1. AI-enabled store staff
Our world-first POV enhances an in-store headset with a generative assistant. Aiding store managers and shop floor staff as they assist customers, troubleshoot issues and complete tasks, the headset upends traditional training models by providing on-demand support.
Tech: GenAI
2. Functional AR
Our AR POV helps consumers navigate the complexity of shopping with purpose. In a test that proved incredibly popular with consumers, AR was overlaid onto shelving in which products are compatible with their specific shopping goals.
Tech: AR, PIM
3. Sustainability via Dynamic Pricing
Following our belief that technology can help minimize food waste, we ran an experiment using AI-based pricing that calculated the peak pricing for perishable products and tied this into real-time screen media to promote to customers.
Tech: Electronic Shelf Labels, AI Time and Price Optimization
4. Next-gen conversational commerce
We have developed and tested a personalized and convenient solution that leverages GenAI to provide customers with meal inspiration, based on real-time availability of stock in-store, and populates their reserve and collect baskets accordingly.
Tech: GenAI, Composable Commerce
5. Generative targeted in-store media
We’re developing real-time, contextualized marketing that can be delivered at optimized moments to relevant audiences on in-store media. Leveraging GenAI to overcome complex business rules and workflows, it enables next-gen personalized experiences.
Tech: Bluetooth Proximity, GenAI
Meeting the evolving needs of retailers and brands
Over multiple pop-ups, CornerShop has welcomed thousands of consumers and has helped hundreds of organizations reshape the future of their retail through cutting-edge ideation workshops. CornerShop has been central to our mission to help clients stay ahead of the competition. Through our broad client network, our global consumer research and vast startup ecosystem, we stay at the leading edge of new experiences and put to the test how feasible, desirable and viable they truly are.
CornerShop has been widely featured in press, including Forbes, ITN and BBC. The experiences we’ve created have spanned across the fashion, grocery, convenience and beauty sectors. We have inspired, educated and guided some of the world’s greatest retailers, brands, banks and telcos through our store, both in-person and virtually.
Going forward, CornerShop will continue to evolve and introduce more innovative technology concepts to suit the evolving needs of retailers and brands. Ultimately, we’re driven by sharing the learnings gleaned through CornerShop with our clients to help them on their own innovation journeys.
Get in touch today to learn how we can help you deliver the future of retail.
