Transforming Meta Into a Lifestyle Retail Brand

Client: Meta
Industry: Consumer Tech
Output: Experiential

Meta's AI glasses had gone viral on TikTok, but third-party retail was broken: bad demos, untrained staff, no brand presence. Meta needed first-party retail fast.

DE-YAN authored Meta's first national 1P retail strategy, building it around a platform called Custom Culture, a framework rooted in local community and identity, applied across every location. Each Meta Lab is localized to the city its in: the inaugural LA flagship was themed around Sweet & Low, a celebration of lowrider culture that shaped everything from the activation choices to the collaborator roster, while permanent locations and pop-ups in New York, Las Vegas, Honolulu, and Barcelona each carry their own regional cues, partnerships, and material details rather than a copy-pasted format.

The stores are centers for community and connection:a café, a laser engraver, a mixed reality lounge, a wall of CRT TVs, a pinball machine upstairs, and a Kusama-style infinite reflection room, all linked back to product. Live experts work the floor, and the entire space doubles as a behavioral research environment, running simultaneously as retail and as a longitudinal study. The materiality and color palette DE-YAN developed went on to redefine Meta's brand guidelines globally.