What was the central goal?
Context
Target's New Ventures & Accelerators team was running Popshop — an in-store program to give Target+ online-only brands a physical presence in the racetrack, the high-traffic perimeter aisle that anchors every store. The first pilot, a branded fixture built for Kaplan Early Learning in Westbury, NY, proved the concept worked: nearly 150,000 guest impressions in six weeks, a 6.3% look rate against a 0.7% industry average for digital ads, and guest intercepts describing the experience as innovative, appealing, and inspiring.
But the v1 fixture had a structural problem. It was a bit closed: tall, brand-specific, enclosed. Guests could technically touch the products, but not easily. It told one brand's story well but couldn't flex for the next brand, or the one after that. At the scale Target was imagining — eventually offered to any Target+ brand as a revenue-generating platform — a purpose-built enclosure was neither economically nor operationally viable. Leadership's own post-pilot roadmap was already questioning whether the distinctive fixture itself was driving value, or whether something more adaptable could do more.
That question was the brief.
My Role
I joined this project as the 3D and computational designer responsible for concepting and modeling the next-generation fixture. I'd spent nearly three years on Target's Open House team prior, which gave me direct exposure to the enormous product variety that might eventually rotate through a Popshop: consumer electronics, IoT devices, STEM toys, beauty tech, home goods. That background shaped every decision I made about configurability. I built the models and renders before transitioning to a new role; my collaborator Allison Melton, carried the research and refinement forward from there.
The Design Problem
The v1 fixture was closed. That single characteristic cascaded into every downstream problem: guests couldn't interact with products, team members had to mediate nearly every transaction, and the form was locked to one brand's aesthetic. The pilot's own qualitative findings flagged it. Future iterations needed to support deeper product interaction and more accessible brand communication.
My goal was a fixture system that was open by default, configurable by store team members with no design background, accessible to guests of all ages and abilities, and reusable across a rotating cast of brands and product types. Critically, it also needed to fit in a Target aisle so that carts, families, and wheelchair users could all move freely around it.
The renders and presentations I produced were internal stakeholder artifacts, meant to pitch modularity as a strategic investment: spend once on a flexible platform rather than repeatedly on purpose-built enclosures.
The System
The concept comprised four freestanding units, each on a wheeled lockable base, designed to be arranged in any combination — a single unit standing alone, two units as a pod, or all four in a continuous line. Two bases extended to 8 feet and two to 12 feet, giving each configuration a natural visual hierarchy without requiring any additional design work per deployment.
Each unit's frame was telescoping, with four discrete height settings. This was the hardest problem to solve in 3D: designing a mechanism legible and operable enough for a store team member to adjust quickly, while remaining stable and safe in a high-traffic environment. The height range meant a single unit could serve as a demo table for a child, a browsing surface for a seated wheelchair user, or a full-height display anchoring the end of an aisle pod.
The shelves were double-hinged and separable, resolving into 13 distinct configurations across flat, angled, and elevated positions. The double hinge was the detail I pushed hardest for. A flat shelf holds a product. An angled shelf holds a tablet or screen at a readable angle. A steeply angled shelf becomes a literature holder or a signage surface. One physical component, minimal team member effort, maximum product range. That single mechanism made the fixture viable for electronics, books, beauty products, and STEM toys without any modification to the unit itself.
Signage had three independent positions per unit: full-height panel in the center of the frame, partial-height panel in the center, or mounted on top of the frame. Across a four-unit pod, this meant a brand could run a continuous narrative, alternate between product callouts and brand story, or concentrate all messaging at eye level — all using the same fixture.
A large lockable drawer in the base of each unit stored extra inventory, spare shelving components, cables, and charging hardware. Wheels on each unit locked independently, so a pod of four could be reconfigured quickly for a new brand or a seasonal refresh.
I modeled approximately eight to nine distinct configurations in Rhino, rendered in Keyshot for clarity and presentation quality. I used Grasshopper selectively (since I was the only person on the team with that backgroundf) on the parametric logic on the components where geometric relationships were complex enough to warrant it. The clay renders showed full aisle context: Target shopping carts, adult and child figures at the fixture, surrounding shelving, to keep every stakeholder decision grounded in the actual physical constraints of deployment.
What the System Was Really Arguing
The renders were presenting a maximum: the full envelope of what the system could do. In practice, a given deployment might use two of the four height settings, or only one signage position, or a subset of shelf configurations. That's standard for large-scale retail systems: you design to the ceiling so procurement and operations can make informed decisions about what to reduce. But some configurations weren't negotiable. The double-hinged shelf was one. Flexible signage positioning was another. Those were the details where collapsing the system's range would have undermined the goal of a single fixture serving any brand, any product type, and any guest.
The v1 Popshop fixture looked, to my eye, dated relative to where Target was positioning itself: a company moving aggressively into IoT, connected products, and tech-forward retail experiences. A closed vitrine from 2019 wasn't the physical expression of that ambition. The modular system was a proposal for what the physical layer of that ambition could actually look like.
And the tl;dr
Outcome
Popshop launched its pilot in early 2019 and was positioned for expansion into a multi-experiment validation roadmap. The pandemic arrived shortly after, and the program almost certainly didn't survive the operational disruptions of 2020. What the modular fixture concept represented, though — a reusable, open, accessible platform for rotating brand experiences — remains a live problem in physical retail.
I did learn three things.
- It might be possible for something to be too modular. I was alarmed by the number of permutations and configurations I could achieve with just a few basic rules, like height of the fixture or angle of the display shelf. If I were to do it again, I would have taken more care to introduce constraints.
- It was hard to develop this further without input from Target's store staff. It's the Visual Merchandising team that's responsible for rotating and displaying product. I would have liked to run the options by them before making a proposal.
- Concept rendering is fun. I'd be itching to do more 3D work, so when this project came to my attention, I was happy to jump in. Though the deliverable was clay renders, it helped tremendously to communicate a key cost-saving concept – flexibility – to the Strategy & Innovation team.
