[BizSights] Malling 3.0: How retailers are upgrading your shopping experience

With e-commerce platforms continuing to offer cheaper goods than many of those sold in bricks and mortar, big Philippine retailers continue to adapt in a bid to attract more consumers to physical stores. 

And the way they’re doing it is by making retail experiential. Here are some recent cases in the Philippines:

DIY Teddy Bears

In the age of experiential retail, buying a Teddy Bear isn’t the way it used to be. 

For the longest time, buying a huggable teddy bear was just picking one from store shelves and paying for it. Now, they’ve made buying that plush toy a more emotional experience. 

In select malls in Metro Manila, create-your-own plush toys brand Hello Bear has set up operations that let people partly create their own huggable plushies.

First, you choose a plush toy animal that’s not filled with stuffing material. 

Second, you attach the plush toy to a machine and by pressing on a foot pedal, the machine blows the fluff into the plush toy. You can fill it up or leave it half-filled, depending on how soft you want it. 

Third, you can choose to add a battery-operated small red heart into the plush to give it an artificial heart beat. It stops automatically when the toy is not being used. You can also add a small voice recorder that can record any message you want the plush to repeat. 

Fourth, you or the attendant stiches the hole.

Fifth, you can opt to buy accessories for the plush toy such as clothes, toy head phone, toy camera, sunglasses, or head band. 

Sixth, give the plushie a name, which will be written on an ID card. 

The plush toy will cost a minimum of P1,000. The cost increases with more gadgets and accessories. 

There are Hello Bear outlets at Century City Mall in Makati; Venice Grand Canal in BGC; Newport World Resorts, Pasay City; Toys R Us Power Plant Mall in Makati; and Toys R Us Opus Mall in Quezon City; Promenade, Greenhills in San Juan City.

Sunnies Flask: Customized water bottles

Similarly, Philippine company Sunnies Inc., which started as a sunglasses retailer, now has other business lines such as selling water bottles. But it’s not your usual choose one from shelves stacked with flasks. 

Sunnies has transformed the act of buying a flask into a retail experience.  

There are three types of flasks — Robo flask, Bubble flask, Pebble flask, with four sizes to choose from 16oz, 25oz, 30oz, and 32 oz. The cheapest flask is the smallest at P695.

There’s a wide array of colors to choose from too. 

After choosing the basic flask components, buyers can opt to add accessories: the rubber boot or bottom (P195 to P245); the glider (P195); flask cleaner (P195), and the flask sling or bag (895). 

Buyers can have their name, initials, or any word or symbol they want engraved — with a number of fonts to choose from — on the insulated bottles for free. 

“We offer something unique. When we launched the flask, it is an industry that’s been there, it is traditional business model.  What we did was to have some customization aspect where you can mix and match your flask. This highly personalized experience is what brings them to the stores,” Sunnies Inc. CEO Eric Dee said in a recent interview on the business show Money Talks.

Sunnies has collaborated with the global hit KPop Demon Hunters and now sells Huntrix-designed flasks. There are 7 ready-made flasks to choose from — Rumi, Mira, Zoey, Jinu, Huntrix, Soda Pop, and Derpy Tiger. Each flask comes with a set of stickers that you can use to design the flask. 

They also sell KPop Demon Hunters name tags, flask slings, and pods (round mini bags). 

Sunnies has complemented their physical upgrade with digital promotions of Sunnies products on TikTok, the young generation’s preferred platform.

“A lot of the growth comes from new market places such as TikTok. A lot of spending, a lot of revenue is now directed into fast purchases from that social channel,” Dee said.  “TikTok is mostly live selling, pushing, explaining price products and much cheaper. We’re doing a lot of both [physical and digital].”

Sunnies has also set up two big outlets — one in SM Mall of Asia and the other in Bonifacio Global City — that combine all their brands – Sunnies eyewear, Sunnies Face makeup, Sunnies Flask, and Sunnies Coffee — so that customers can “seek the full Sunnies experience…,” a place where people can “meet, drink, read, and engage.” 

​SM Megamalls president Steven Tan, in a recent interview on the ABS-CBN News Channel, cited the case of the Sunnies World outlet in SM Mall of Asia as a prime example of how enterprises stay relevant in the digital age. 

“Filipinos, especially the younger ones, GenZs and Gen Alphas, they look for experiences nowadays. It’s no longer, you put out your wares, they come, they buy. You really have to entice them, make it really pleasurable and enjoyable for them,” he said. 

“In Sunnies World in MOA, you can do personalization, emboss your initials, they even have a café inside, they have a make-up consultant for you. All these things you cannot do online. These are things online cannot replace.” 

ScreenX: Future of cinema? 

And then, there’s cinema 3.0, supposedly better than IMAX.

SM Prime, the biggest cinema operator in the country, hasn’t given up on the cinema business, even though more people continue to shift to streaming platforms for movie-going. 

Last September, it opened the country’s first SCREENX theater in the Philippines’ largest mall, SM Mall of Asia (MOA).

“SCREENX enhances the traditional movie experience by extending the image across the main screen onto the theatre’s right and left walls, creating a fully immersive viewing environment unlike any other,” said SM Cinema in a press release. 

Below are some videos that show what watching on SCREENX is like. 

SM partnered with South Korean-based CJ 4DPLEX, a company that has developed film technologies such as 4DX and UltraDX. 

If you want to experience SCREENX during the long holiday break, you can watch Avatar: Fire and Ash at SM MOA. Tickets cost P700 each. 

SM Supermalls president Steven Tan said SCREENX could attract the younger generation back to cinemas. 

“You just have to create a different experience, they want immersive experience. Screen X, the latest technology, [the screen is] is not just in front of you but goes all the way to the sides, like a 360-degree experience…,” Tan said in a recent interview with the Manila Bulletin. “Gone are the days of big cinemas. They’re not after that.”

Whether these business innovations will succeed for the long term remain to be seen, especially since they make the retail experience more expensive. But one thing’s for sure: we’re going to see more experiential retail in 2026 and in the years to come. – Rappler.com