Beyond the Store: Why Global Brands Are Selling Experiences Across Borders

Cover Design by Hallie Teich

Why Global Brands Are Selling Experiences Across Borders

By: Ania Smetek

Buying a Louis Vuitton bag online takes a second. So why did the company build a ship-shaped structure in central Shanghai that makes visitors walk through a two-floor exhibition on the history of travel before they reach anything for sale? Entry is free, and visits are booked by reservation. And why does Hermès run a free contemporary art gallery on the eighth floor of its Ginza building in Tokyo? For companies that sell objects, these are strange investments: places where many visitors actually buy nothing at all.

It makes more sense once you stop thinking of them as stores. When a purchase can happen anywhere, a brand needs another reason to exist, and some luxury brands have answered with culture: exhibitions, cafés, architecture worth crossing a city to see. But a building abroad is an unusual kind of advertisement. A brand can bring its logo, its archive and its architects anywhere, but it cannot bring the city, and it cannot bring the reputation it enjoys at home.

The Louis, which opened in June 2025, shows how much a brand can carry. Its hull is clad in silver Monogram, and its upper levels are stacked like the steamer trunks Louis Vuitton made for ocean voyages in the 19th century, a link to Shanghai’s long history as a port. Purchases can be stamped with Shanghai motifs. Inside, visitors follow a route through Visionary Journeys, an exhibition by OMA’s Shohei Shigematsu, before reaching the shop and, at the top, a café.

The public also read the building on its own terms. Chinese social media users noticed that its sharp bow pointed at the Starbucks Reserve Roastery across the street and joked about feng shui, which treats sharp angles aimed at a building as “bad energy”. That conversation carried the building to an audience far beyond the people who had booked a visit, and in a way, it had to. Reservations keep crowds manageable, but they come at a cost: a passerby without one sees the ship only from the outside.

Hermès tends to build its presence from the inside out, leaving key decisions to the people closest to each store. Its store directors travel to Paris twice a year to choose the stock for their own boutiques; as a former head of its American business put it, “no two boutiques will ever have the same assortment.” A visit can turn up something no other store carries, and the same local attention extends to service: a salesperson who learns a client’s taste becomes part of what the brand offers.

In Ginza, that approach has a landmark to match. For Maison Hermès, completed in 2001, Renzo Piano wrapped a narrow tower in about 13,000 glass blocks made specially in Florence. By day the facade looks silver; at night it glows – an effect inspired by the lanterns traditionally hung at the doors of Japanese houses. Where most flagships fill their windows, only a few clear blocks at street level display merchandise. On the eighth floor, Le Forum, a free gallery now run by the Hermès foundation, was planned from the start, and its changing exhibitions give people reasons to return.

Yet even Hermès could not take its identity for granted abroad. The company registered its name in China in 1977, but not its Chinese name, Ai Ma Shi. A Guangdong menswear company registered a near-identical mark, and Hermès spent years trying to have it canceled. In 2012, a Chinese court sided with the trademark authorities, finding that Hermès had not shown the mark was obtained illegally or that its own name was well known among mainland consumers. Under China’s first-to-file system, fame in Paris did not count as fame in China. Crossing borders shows that brands sell more than just a product. It sells an experience, and that experience, down to the name customers use for it, is worth fighting for, whatever its culture or laws.

The two brands lean in different directions without being opposites. The Louis is built to be booked, photographed, and discussed; Hermès cultivates repeat visits and long personal relationships. For both, the payoff is attention, goodwill, and loyalty that may turn into purchases later, at another boutique, online or in another country. Those returns are hard to trace to a building, and both still have to justify their cost.

That is the less obvious difficulty of global branding. A logo can cross a border overnight. Being known, in the sense that matters to customers and courts alike, has to be built on the other side. In Shanghai, the Monogram arrived as a ship, and the city read it through feng shui before most visitors had stepped inside. In Tokyo, a French brand, an Italian architect, and Florentine glass produced a building that takes its glow from the lanterns of traditional Japanese houses. A recognizable identity can get a brand into a foreign city. Whether that identity comes to mean anything there depends on the work the brand is willing to put into understanding the place.