Catching feelings: Chemistry sequences in retail stores

With e-commerce continuously growing, what is the unique role of the physical store today—and why should retailers build on them with confidence?

Adam Devey Smith: Ten years ago, going to a shop did several jobs at once: discovering, comparing, handling, deciding, paying. Most of that work has now moved upstream, onto the phone. By the time the customer walks through the door, the heavy lifting is mostly done. But retail stores have, at this very specific moment in cultural history, been promoted into a much bigger role than retailers themselves have noticed. It is one of the few remaining places in daily life where experience, honesty, connection, and trust still meet in one room — and where a customer, briefly, gets to be a person rather than a profile. The brands that understand they have been promoted into that role will be the ones the customer keeps choosing to walk into.

For retailers, physical stores have another valuable purpose.

What is that?

Adam Devey Smith: Brands sit inside customers’ heads as facts that turn out to be wrong but feel rock-solid. Like: «That brand is expensive. This brand is for older people. That brand has gone downhill.» No advertising campaign can dislodge these, because the customer doesn’t think they are beliefs. They think they are facts.

The store can. Thirty minutes inside a well-staffed, well-considered store will overwrite one of those rock-solid beliefs in a way nothing else can. The customer didn’t update because they were told to. They updated because the room contradicted the belief, in person, before the belief had time to defend itself. The store is the only medium in retail with the power to correct a memory. It works at both ends of the price scale. Gentle Monster physically rebuilt the optician category as gallery space; the customer who walked in carrying the old memory walked out carrying a new one. Best Buy did the same memory-correction work for consumer-electronics service through Geek Squad, branding the help itself and converting a category memory of frustration into one of competence.

Experiential retailing is something many aspire to do: What are examples of truly compelling in-store experiences and what can other retailers learn from them?

Adam Devey Smith: If you really want to understand emotional triggers in 2026, sit in a room with a few fourteen-year-olds and ask them why a particular brand makes them feel something. Their answers — sharp, fast, sincere — make most adult focus groups look polite. They are not an unusual sample. They are the leading edge of where every customer is heading. New generations share emotions with comparative ease. If they cannot articulate why your store made them feel something, your store didn’t.

What we are designing in a store is not «an experience» — the word has gone soft. It is a feeling, and a feeling, beneath the marketing language, is something chemical that happens in the body. Four kinds of chemistry give us the buttons:

Dopamine is the small-win, the unexpected reward. Not the reward itself — the I didn’t see that coming, and it was good signal. The pineapple machine in the supermarket fruit section, watched by every kid in the aisle. The Lidl middle aisle, where the assortment occasionally produces oh — just what I need. The bookshop’s staff-picks table where one of them is exactly the book you’d been meaning to read. Dopamine is the easiest to design and the easiest to fake; the customer can tell.

Oxytocin is warmth, trust, being seen — recognition without performance. The smile that walks you to aisle six rather than pointing. The barber who remembers how you take it. The upstairs reading room of an independent bookshop, telling you to take your time. The most under-budgeted feeling in retail, and the one a screen cannot do.

Serotonin is belonging, recognition by a tribe. Different from oxytocin: oxytocin is «I am safe with this person», serotonin is «I am one of these people». The wine merchant who answers what’s drinking well right now? on the assumption you’ll understand. The cycling-shop mechanic asking which ride you’ve just done. The Patagonia worn-wear counter where the beat-up jacket is the membership credential.

Endorphins are communal joy, laughter, shared effort — the body’s own opioid response to use and play. The Jellycat audience queue. A Saturday-night DJ set in a Lynk & Co Club. The Sports Direct Manchester flagship — lift-and-learn shoe walls, the gait-analysis treadmill, the basketball half-court, the Hyrox drill bar — where the category turns into something the customer physically does.

Every room has a chemistry register, whether the team writing the brief knows it or not. The great ones run all four in sequence, with the customer barely noticing the score change — dopamine on arrival, oxytocin at the counter, serotonin among your tribe, endorphins on the way out.

You’ve worked in global retail environments for decades. What are the biggest mistakes companies are still making in their physical stores right now?

Adam Devey Smith: Retail often uses the wrong sense. The industry is built around vision because design awards are judged from images — and the next generation of designers learns to optimise for what photographs well while the rest of the sensory toolkit atrophies. The trouble is that vision is the weakest sense for embedding memory. Smell and taste have direct neural pathways to the hippocampus and amygdala; they bypass conscious analysis and go straight to limbic recall. Sound is nearly as strong. Touch is fourth. Vision is fifth. The retail industry has spent thirty years optimising for the sense that grabs attention and ignoring the four senses that actually embed memory.

The exemplars are scattered but unmistakable. Taste: IKEA’s meatballs taught a generation what Sweden tastes like. Sound: a travel agency piping wave-sounds puts the customer biochemically on holiday before any conversation begins. Touch: Apple’s wooden tables were a touch and metaphor shift first. Smell: the bread by the supermarket entrance. None will photograph. All will be remembered.

The discipline is not to add senses one at a time as decoration. It is to design which sense carries the memory, and to engineer the visit so that sense fires at the right moment. Vision does the wayfinding. Sound sets the mood. Touch confirms the quality. Smell and taste, used sparingly, become the things the customer carries home in their head for months and that bring them back without ever consciously knowing why.

Building those experiences requires bold decisions but also careful execution. How should retail leaders govern that combination — boldness and rigour — inside a large company?

Adam Devey Smith: Two disciplines decide whether brave retail actually ships. The first is «who is in the room when the room is designed». Most retail design teams are startlingly narrow — merchandising, design, ops, finance, a senior commercial leader who signs off. Out of that small huddle comes a building that will be inhabited by hundreds of thousands of human beings, of every age, body, income, culture and ability. Narrow inputs produce narrow outputs. The cheapest brand investment a retailer can make is to widen the brief — by identity (gender, ethnicity, age, neurotype, disability) and by function (HR, education, partnerships, customer service, the store team). IKEA does this through a Democratic Design Council; Selfridges has built decades of co-curation with cultural figures from outside the commercial brief.

The second discipline is bravery — but selectively applied. The whole company is built to minimise risk; that is what large companies are. Every function has been trained to reduce variance, protect margin, eliminate downside. The antibodies are not malfunctioning when they push back. They are doing the job they were built for. Compromise is the right tool on most of the work, where the risk is low. On the brave decisions — the flagship, the new format, the brand promise that hasn't been tested — the discipline reverses. The risk is higher because the bet is reaching, and the answer is not to compromise it but to mitigate it. Test, pilot, sequence the rollout, build the safety net, do the homework. NASA shows the model. The same organisation succeeds and fails with the same system. The variable is whether the team has done the mitigation work before launch — or whether somebody said: OK, I'll run with it.

Consumers visit physical stores also for human interaction and advice. How can digitalisation and AI enhance the visit and what are their limits?​

Adam Devey Smith: The pattern with AI in retail is the same as with any other technology: it works best when the customer doesn’t notice it is there, and worst when it is the headline. Machines can buy, but only people can desire. AI handles the buying so the store can be devoted to the desiring.

The cleanest way to think about agentic AI is not through the distinction between needs and wants. It is through friction. Frictionless is not the same as good, and friction is not the same as bad. Some friction is the cost of the channel — the trolley pushed, the queue endured, the pack searched for — and stripping it out is what makes the operation efficient. Some friction is the joy of the channel — the unhurried browse, the unexpected product find, the conversation with the staff member who knows the product — and stripping it out is what makes the visit forgettable.

The two are not opposed. They are economically linked. The frictionless efficiency at the back of the operation is what funds the friction-rich joy at the front of it. It funds it three ways at once — in margin, in staff hours, and in floor square metres. Agentic AI is excellent at removing the first kind of friction. The discipline of physical retail is to take the saving — the budget, the hours, the recovered space — and reinvest it in the second.

If you had to give one piece of advice to retail leaders what would it be?

Adam Devey Smith: Tighten the back office; animate the front of the room. Efficiency by 2030 is a hygiene factor everyone has. The brands that win will be the ones that turned their efficiency into intensity — micro-gestures the customer feels in their body, macro-gestures the customer talks about for years.

That, in the end, is the work. Define the brand. Align the company to it. Translate it into gestures the customer feels in the body, not just understands in the head. Engineer the chemistry deliberately. Programme novelty with discipline. Use AI as connective tissue, never the show. And stay braver than the people around the table will instinctively want you to be.

The customers are waiting. They have been waiting for longer than most retail leaders care to admit. And they are still, every Sunday afternoon, walking into shops looking for milk and walking out with a basket full of things they didn’t know they wanted. That basket is the opportunity. It always was.

Retail Reality Check at the GDI Retail Summit

At the International Retail Summit on 16 and 17 September 2026, Adam Devey Smith will explore this topic further in his keynote. Together with international thought leaders, bold retail companies and innovative startups, we will discuss why retail has less reason for permanent crisis mode than is often claimed – and how companies can make more confident use of their strengths. Expect international perspectives, strategic orientation and practical impulses for an industry that is far more adaptable than its reputation suggests.