Erin Lillis, Travel Retail & Corporate Director Asia Pacific, Lacoste spoke at the Sensation Zeduction masterclass.

Lacoste’s successful food and beverage concept, Café Lacoste, is set to make its way into travel retail in the form of pop-ups and hybrid retail-café concepts, with its first step set for early 2027.

While the exact details of the format are still in the under wraps, Erin Lillis, Travel Retail & Corporate Director Asia Pacific, Lacoste, revealed that its debut stamp on travel retail will be in the Middle East.

This vibrant expression of the brand has proven to be a hit with customers in the domestic markets, according to the brand, delivering relevance and driving high engagement.

“Customers no longer want to just go in to a store, buy a product, walk out and that’s it,” Lillis explained at the travel retail-focused ‘Sensation Zeduction’ Gen Z masterclass co-hosted by m1nd-set and Blueprint at The Majestic Hotel in Cannes on 27 September. “You need to be able to pull the heartstrings and connect with people deeply.”

Café Lacoste first rolled out as a pilot as pop-ups in Harajuku (on the domestic market).

“We were seeing that the engagement was strong – it was super easy to make conversations with the customers that were coming in. We are engaging with them through their stomachs and through the need for Gen Z to be not only customers but creators in the social space.”

DJs were also brought in on Friday and Saturday evenings to further bolster the connection between the brand and its offerings with consumers.

The next step was the first stand-alone Café Lacoste, which opened domestically in Paris, just behind the Lacoste flagship store.

As with the pop-ups, the concept is deeply linked to Lacoste’s heritage, with everything from eye-catching back walls that speak to the heritage of the brand to polo shirt shaped cakes and the Eau de Croco green drink creating photogenic angles for sharing on social media.

Brand cues come to life in interesting and authentic ways.

“To say it has been a success story is an understatement,” said Lillis, relaying how the performance of the store is more than 40% up on where it was planned to be.

More recently there has been a pop-up takeover inside the Le Méridien Beach Plaza in Monaco for six months (in the existing restaurant) and Lillis said the concept more than tripled the revenue generated from the space.

She went on to explain how this is an example of doing things differently and breaking the mold – something the Blueprint and m1nd-set insights presented at the masterclass strongly indicate is required to keep win over curious consumers – especially Gen Z.

Erin Lillis, Travel Retail & Corporate Director Asia Pacific, Lacoste and Thomas Kaneko Henningsen, Partner at Blueprint at the Sensation Zeduction in Cannes.

‘The question is about how to make travel retail more relevant and turning dwell time into living time – it’ snot a generational thing, it’s a lifestyle thing,” said Thomas Kaneko Henningsen, Partner at Blueprint.

Café Lacoste is just one example of how the fashion brand is imprinting its DNA on travel retail. The company is also deploying gashapon machines for a fun way to access accessories and other merchandise.

In November, there’s a vending machine concept opening at Perth Airport featuring the brand’s ‘court lines’ polos display (which sees the garments neatly packed into easy-to-shop tubes), with an AI assistant offering a preview of what the polos look like on (so customers can choose their ideal colours).

A sizeable activation in the pipeline is the padel court, which is opening airside in Terminal 3 at a “very large South East Asian airport” soon.

“We had three airports queuing to offer us free space to implement a full padel court,” said Lillis.

“Its about being surprising and innovative – what better way to create buzz among passengers of any age?”

It will be flanked be vending machines to transition players into purchasers as Lillis said: “We are all here to make money at the end of the day.”

Her ultimate message is to “stop thinking [just] about price and the way we used to work” to deliver relevance for today’s travellers in today’s travel retail environment.

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