Optus Store Generations Programme

Optus does not commission a store, it commissions a generation. Between 2012 and 2020 the retail concept moved from Generation 4 through to Generation 7, and Generation 6 alone was reworked five separate times as digital display, self-navigation and connected product each changed what the shop floor had to do. Every revision landed on an estate of more than 300 trading stores.

The challenge is the arithmetic. A national network cannot be rebuilt at the speed its concept changes, so a generation that can only be delivered by full construction will reach a fraction of the estate before it is superseded, leaving a network that reads as a record of when each store was last touched.

Greater Group developed each generation as something deployable rather than as a single resolved interior, settling it in a milestone store and then documenting it so it could be built accurately by others across any tenancy. Macquarie carried the Generation 6 Experience Store, with the yes bubble and an open plan supporting both self-navigation and consultation. Chadstone carried its evolution and a flexible digital shopfront platform. George Street took the generation to flagship scale, and Queen Street Mall established Generation 7.

The most consequential move is the least visible. The Generation 6 re-brand introduced a modular wall merchandising system and cut the wet trades required on site, which meant a store could be re-merchandised without construction. That single decision is what makes a 300-store programme affordable, because it converts most of a generational change from a building job into a changeout, and it is why later generations could reach the network in years rather than decades.

The estate reads as a single network rather than a timeline of its own construction history, which is what a brand is buying when it commissions a retail generation instead of a retail project. The approach is also what made the recent stores possible at pace. Highpoint and Melbourne Central are the current expression, both delivered around the flagship’s language, and Chadstone took Silver at the 2017 Sydney Design Awards. The programme’s transferable asset is not any one interior, it is a concept documented well enough to be issued to a national network and changed again three years later.