Marketing Unsexy Products

Plus: Luxury wig brand Parfait introduces AI, Soho is turning into Disneyland.

Good morning. Hope everyone is winding down for the holiday or something.

Will I be participating in Black Friday? Yes I will. I want to buy a NuFace so I can resist Botox as long as possible, and I want a new coffeemaker.

I’ve also decided that I’m going to get my nails done all the time because it makes me soooooo happy and I feel very behind in the adoption of this habit.

• Soho is turning into Disneyland. This is no surprise to any New Yorker. I moved to Manhattan when I was 17, and this was the case then. But was the case this particular BizJournal story is making is rooted in the experiential stores on every other block. It started with the Museum of Ice Cream. In came Sloomoo Institute, a slime museum. “The next thing you know, you're spending two hours in a space like that,” Lee & Associates Senior Leasing Broker Paul Popkin said. “And you're spending a lot of money and the kids love it. The parents love it because it's different. The mother can shop, and dad can take the kids through this and it's fun.” The average shopper might spend 15 to 20 minutes in a traditional retail store, that same shopper would more than an hour in the store of an experiential retailer. “It's what consumers are craving and wanting, especially after the pandemic,” Melissa Gonzalez, principal at architecture and design firm MG2 and author of “The Pop Up Paradigm: How Brands Build Human Connections in a Digital Age,” told the New York Business Journal. “They want to go out and they want to have a sense of adventure and escapism. Something they can tell their friends about.”