Experiential Retail Is the New Retail

Mexico has become one of the most digitally advanced retail markets in the world. According to AMVO’s 2026 Online Sales Study, e-commerce grew 19.2% in 2025 to reach MX$941 billion (US$54 billion), now representing 17.7% of the country’s total retail sales — placing Mexico eighth worldwide in e-commerce penetration, ahead of several developed economies. Mexico leads Latin America on this metric and is projected to match the United States in e-commerce contribution to retail as early as this year.
Here is the paradox: in this environment, the most important investment my company made in Mexico this year was not digital. It was a physical store.
That is not a contradiction. It is the logical consequence of what digital growth is doing to the role of the store. When nearly 1 in 5 retail pesos moves online — and when the digital channel handles convenience, replenishment, and price comparison better than any sales floor ever could — the store is released from a job it no longer needs to do alone. The transaction is migrating. What cannot migrate is the experience of a brand: the way a space makes a customer feel, slow down, and remember. That is the new job of physical retail, and the retailers who understand it are redesigning their stores around it.

The Store Has a New Job
For decades, retail productivity in Mexico was measured almost exclusively in sales per square meter. Every meter had to sell. That logic built efficient stores — and interchangeable ones. Walk through any premium corridor in the country and much of what you see is distribution real estate: product, shelving, a cash desk.
But in categories where purchases are intimate, considered, and infrequent — lingerie is a perfect example — the hardest battle is not converting a customer who walks in. It is giving her a reason to walk in at all, long before she intends to buy. The brands winning globally have understood that the store must work as media, as hospitality, and as a destination — not only as a point of sale. Nike’s House of Innovation, Gentle Monster’s art-installation stores, and closer to home, the reinvention of the department store experience by El Palacio de Hierro all point in the same direction: the space itself has become the message.

What Avenida Masaryk Taught Us
This year, ETAM opened its new flagship on Avenida Masaryk in Polanco, inspired by our emblematic Haussmann boutique in Paris. On paper, it is a 125m² lingerie store in a premium corridor. In practice, it is a laboratory for a different thesis of retail — and two decisions inside it illustrate the point.
The first was Café ETAM, the first café the brand has opened anywhere in the world. The internal objections were entirely reasonable: we would sacrifice selling space in one of the most expensive corridors in the country, we are a lingerie brand and not a hospitality operator, and we had never run a café. We opened it anyway, because the strategic logic outweighed the operational fear. A café lowers the threshold of entry. It converts “I am not buying lingerie today” into “let’s have a coffee at ETAM” — and once a customer is inside our world, discovery does the rest.
The result has exceeded the business case. The café operates at full capacity, and it has become a measurable magnet for first-time customers — women who had never entered an ETAM before, drawn by coffee and pastry, who leave having met the brand. The square meters we “sacrificed” turned out to be the most productive ones in the store: they manufacture traffic, dwell time, and new customer relationships that no media budget was delivering at comparable cost.
The second decision was a 24/7 vending machine offering lingerie essentials outside opening hours — an answer to the reality that consumption no longer follows store schedules. What began as a service innovation now generates roughly 10% of the store’s sales, on zero incremental staffing. Immediacy, autonomy, and discretion turn out to be commercial propositions, not just convenience features.

Experience Is a P&L Line, Not a Marketing Concept
The lesson from Masaryk is not “add a café.” It is that experiential retail only works when it is treated as commercial architecture rather than decoration. Every experiential element must have a job in the funnel: the café acquires new customers, the vending machine captures out-of-hours demand, the Parisian design gives customers a reason to photograph, share, and return. Experience should be measured the way we measure everything else — new-to-brand traffic, dwell time, conversion, repeat visits — and held to the same standard of return.
Mexico is the right market to make this bet. Retail here is growing on both sides of the channel divide, consumers are among the most digitally engaged in the world, and their expectations of physical spaces are rising accordingly. The store is not dying; the boring store is. In the most digital retail market Latin America has ever seen, the future belongs to spaces that give people what a screen cannot.
The new retail is not physical or digital. It is memorable.