This October, the Creative Retail Awards will once again bring together some of the industry’s leading figures, businesses and creative teams for a night celebrating the work shaping the future of physical retail.
More than 500 entries have been submitted for the 2026 programme, spanning five continents and covering everything from flagship stores and heritage spaces to pop-ups, installations and immersive experiences. Taken together, they offer a revealing picture of where retail design is heading and how expectations around experience, sustainability and permanence are continuing to shift.
Ahead of this year’s awards, Retail Focus speaks to Antony Behiels, co-organiser of the Creative Retail Awards, about the work that stood out, the growing influence of temporary retail, the realities of judging and what separates a memorable project from the rest.
- More than 500 entries came in this year. What does that tell you about the health of the industry?
It tells you the work is there, and that people are proud of it. Retail has had a rough few years and it would have been easy for the budgets to go and the ambition to go with them. That hasn’t happened. What we’re seeing is money being spent more carefully, on spaces that have to earn their keep.
It made it the hardest year yet for our judges.
- What stood out about the work itself?
The range, mostly. We had a Grade II listed food hall in Piccadilly and a mural on a wall in Wandsworth in the same programme. Immersive tech on Oxford Street and a jeweller on a street corner in Lisbon.
And the projects that stuck with the judges weren’t usually the biggest ones. They were the ones with a clear idea behind them that someone had actually seen through properly.
The other thing I noticed is how much of the strong work now sits outside the traditional store. Windows, collaborations, installations. What we mean by retail design keeps getting wider.
- More than a third of the shortlisted projects were temporary. Is permanence going out of fashion?
Something’s shifting, definitely. Brands are spending flagship money now on spaces that’ll be gone in six weeks, and they’re doing it because those spaces travel. A pop-up that runs a month can reach more people through what gets shared than a store sitting on a high street for ten years.
I wouldn’t say permanence is finished though. A good store has to work every day for years and that’s a harder discipline, if anything. But the balance has changed.
- Sustainable Display is a category in its own right. Is the industry genuinely changing, or is this still largely presentational?
It’s changing, but unevenly. What I’d say is the entries in that category got a lot more specific this year. People are talking about materials, reuse, what happens to the thing at the end. Not just saying a project was sustainable and hoping nobody digs.
We’ve still got a long way to go, and all this temporary retail we’ve just been talking about makes it harder, not easier. But it’s a question that gets asked at the brief now rather than afterwards. That’s a real difference.
- The shortlist includes projects in nine countries outside the UK. How did that happen?
Slowly, and mostly by word of mouth. We never set out to be a UK awards programme. The work in this sector has always crossed borders, and the agencies and suppliers doing it here are often delivering in New York or Osaka or Seoul in the same year.
This year it spans five continents. That matters to entrants because the recognition carries weight with international clients. And it matters to the judging, because you’re comparing against a much wider standard.
- Independent stores compete in the same programme as global luxury houses. Is that a fair contest?
They’ve got their own category, which is deliberate. You can’t reasonably judge a jeweller in Leeds against a seven figure budget.
But the independents do very well, and the judges notice. I think constraint produces clarity. Some of the entries I remember most this year came from small teams who couldn’t afford to get a single decision wrong.
- Industry awards attract a degree of scepticism. How do you answer it?
By pointing at how the judging actually works. Every entry gets assessed at an in-person judging day, by a panel from across the industry. They sit in a room, argue about the work, and decide. Organisers and sponsors have no influence over any category, and that’s not just a form of words. It’s the rule the whole thing rests on.
Sponsorship buys you visibility, from the launch right through to the coverage after the night. However, that’s all it buys. If that weren’t true the awards would be worthless, and everyone in the room would work it out inside a year.
- What separates a strong entry from a weak one?
A weak entry tells you what got built. A strong one tells you why, and what happened next.
The judges are experienced people. They can see a good looking space for themselves. What they can’t see from a photograph is the brief, or the constraint you were up against, or the thing you solved that nobody else would even notice. And that’s exactly the bit people leave out.
So if you’ve got a number that shows it worked, put it in. If something was awkward, say so. The entries that get through are almost always the ones where somebody took the questions seriously.
- Why The Clapham Grand?
Because the venue ought to live up to the work. Most awards evenings happen in hotel ballrooms and there’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s not a room anybody remembers afterwards.
The Grand opened in 1900 as a variety theatre, built by a group led by Dan Leno. Since then it’s been a cinema, a bingo hall and a nightclub, and it’s kept its balconies and its royal boxes and all that plasterwork through the lot of it. For a programme that celebrates what people do with physical space, a building with 125 years of reinvention in it felt about right.
- The Spotlight Award is decided by public vote rather than by your judges. What does that add?
It answers a different question. Our panel assesses the work on its merits, in a room, over a full day. The Spotlight Award measures what happened once the work was out in the world, and those two things don’t always agree.
Look at the ten. adidas, Nike, Prada, LOEWE, Dr. Martens, and nine of them were temporary. That’s flagship money going into spaces built to last weeks. Whether all that ambition actually connected with anyone is a question only the public can answer, so we put it to them. Voting closes on Friday 4 September.
The 2026 programme reflects a retail design sector continuing to evolve across permanent stores, temporary formats and experience-led spaces, with creativity, execution and adaptability remaining central to the strongest work. The Creative Retail Awards 2026 celebrations will take place at The Clapham Grand on 15 October, with tickets available now.
