Phygital
The next generation expects more from us as brand builders and retailers. Rightly so. They expect something better. And for anyone who cares about this industry, that should feel less like a warning and more like a wake-up call.
Consumer behaviour has always been worth paying attention to, but right now it feels unusually alive. People are deliberate. They think harder about what they buy and why it matters. They know what they will support and what they will walk away from. Consciously or not, they are pushing every brand and every creative team to raise their game.
Gen Z and Gen Alpha are not distant-future audiences we can prepare for slowly. They are already here, already spending, already reshaping the rules. And the way they approach shopping does not fit the old playbooks.
The journey almost always begins in the digital world: a TikTok clip, a creator's recommendation, a screenshot dropped into a group chat at midnight. But that is rarely where it ends. They want to feel the fabric between their fingers. They want to see colour in natural light. They want to stand inside a space and sense what a brand actually stands for. Online and offline have merged into one loop: scroll, click, visit, touch, share, return. Phygital goes a step beyond omnichannel. Where omnichannel connects the channels, phygital connects the feeling. It is the experience the customer carries from screen to store and back again, without ever sensing a join.
Delivering on that experience requires something that cannot be automated: a clear point of view, held from the first digital touchpoint to the last moment in store. The brands that understand this are pulling ahead. The distance between them and those who do not is growing faster than most people expected.
Gucci shows what happens when identity loses its footing. When the creative direction blurred and the brand lost clarity about who it was speaking to, the numbers reflected it quickly. Sales dropped by 25% in the first quarter of 2025 and continue to decline into 2026. The price point has stayed high, which I believe is a good decision for the brand. The stores still looked polished. But something harder to measure has shifted; the sense of who Gucci was speaking to and why. The connection to the audience had weakened in a way no campaign can fix quickly.
Over the same period, Miu Miu grew by 41% in the first nine months of 2025. The creative direction felt specific, unapologetic and clear. What made it land was the combination of a strong identity and fashion that genuinely resonated. Their sneaker became a cultural moment, copied across the market almost immediately. New customers discovered the brand through it. Long-time followers recognised it as entirely, unmistakably Miu Miu. That kind of surge does not come from a trend report; it comes from knowing exactly who you are and having the product to prove it. Data informed the scale. Human judgment made the call.
At LVMH, the same quality shows up differently. Louis Vuitton opened LV The Place Seoul – a destination combining retail, hospitality and culture in a way that gives people a reason to stay, not just a reason to visit. At Christian Dior, Jonathan Anderson's first collections arrived in stores at the start of 2026 and met customers who were ready for something new. Both brands chose to lead rather than wait. That decision shows in the energy around them.
I have seen this from the inside. During my time at L'Occitane, the brand's consistency was not a policy. It was a practice. Every customer interaction, in every store, was shaped by the same conviction: the person coming through the door deserved to feel genuinely valued. Not as a sales target. As a guest. The decisions that upheld that standard were unglamorous and constant in training, in store design, in how a product was handed over. But the cumulative effect was unmistakable. You could feel it the moment you walked in. The magic of the experience was built on the discipline of the operation.
What connects these examples runs deeper than ambition or resources. The decisions that shaped them were made by people willing to back a creative instinct before the market confirmed it was right. Data can reveal where customers drop off in a journey, how long they stay, which pages they read. That matters. But data, or AI, cannot come up with the original idea for a concept, or decide what a store should feel like on a quiet Tuesday afternoon, or recognise the risk worth taking when no one else has tried it yet. Those calls belong to human judgment. That has always been true. What has changed is how rare it is becoming, and how obvious the gap is when it disappears.
H&M's return to Hamngatan in Stockholm is one of the moves that reminds me why this industry matters, and is genuinely inspiring. After five years away, they came back with something completely reimagined.
From what I have seen online, the space is large but not overwhelming. Design has room to breathe. It connects with the H&M app so that physical and digital work as one. Pre-loved pieces sit alongside new collections with the same care and presence as the latest drop, woven into the floor as an equal part of the offer, not separated into a corner. Every category is there, but the store behaves like a destination: somewhere to browse, to pause, to find something you were not expecting.
A concept this clear and considered does not come from a brief assembled in an afternoon. It comes from a team that believed in what they were building and was trusted to see it through. Five years is a long time to re-work a flagship. But consider the alternative: a store that reopens looking like everything else, drawing the same customers, generating the same results. The cost of that outcome in brand relevance, in customer loyalty, in the energy of the people working there, is far higher than the cost of patience. H&M understood that. The investment was not a gamble. It was risk management.
Selfridges' 40 Duke opened less than a week ago and immediately feels like a chapter in a long story rather than a launch. I am in awe. The experience is reserved for the most loyal customers; the ones for whom Selfridges is already home ground. It brings together personal shopping suites, beauty studios, a restaurant, a gallery and private dining rooms into a single experience where nothing feels accidental. Light, acoustics, materials – all of it considered. The space moves you gently from browsing to conversation to simply being there. Time softens. In 1909, Harry Gordon Selfridge handed keys to his first customers and said "everyone is welcome." 40 Duke carries that idea forward. The loyal customer today does not receive a key; they receive entry to somewhere they genuinely cannot find anywhere else.
Both projects signal something steadier than pure ambition: a long view, held even when short-term thinking would have been easier. And both began not with a store design, but with a clear answer to a simple question: who are we actually building this for?
This generation is not searching for endless choice. They want better options, sharper thinking, and more honest use of the tools already available. When a brand does the work properly, the response is immediate and loyal in a way that no points programme has ever matched. They come back. They bring people. They talk about it.
The brands that will hold their attention are the ones willing to use new tools without letting those tools make the decisions. AI and technology can remove friction, surface behaviour, and personalise where it genuinely helps. But the direction still has to come from people. From someone who cares about what they are part of, or the experience of walking into a well-considered space. Someone who thought about the customer before they arrived. The first step is rarely a store redesign. It is usually a conversation about who the organisation is actually building for, and whether that answer is consistent across every team that touches the customer.
Phygital is not just channel strategy. It is a way of working: every touchpoint considered, the hand-off from screen to store made to feel natural, the customer treated as someone worth thinking about carefully.
This industry has never been easy to navigate. Right now, it feels harder than most. But the new generation of consumers with all their demands, their clarity, their refusal to settle, remind me why it is worth it. They are not making our work harder. They are making it matter more. For anyone willing to think clearly, create bravely and care about the person who shows up—this is the best creative brief the industry has seen in a long time.
Cecilie Dobson
Founder, Dobson Advisory