How do you design for a post-pandemic retail customer? (A Deloitte Case Study}

Jon Račinskas
May 4
3 min read

Updated: Aug 18

As COVID-19 transformed the way people shopped, one of America’s largest grocery chains needed to understand how physical retail, automation, and customer expectations might evolve.

Embedded within Deloitte’s consulting team as a fractional Creative Director, I researched emerging behaviours, envisioned the future of grocery retail, and translated that thinking into an immersive VR prototype stakeholders could explore before making strategic investments.

Discover

In 2021, the pandemic had fundamentally reshaped grocery retail. Online ordering had accelerated, curbside pickup had become mainstream, and automation was rapidly changing how stores operated. While retailers could respond to immediate challenges, few had the time or capability to imagine what grocery shopping might look like once the crisis had passed.

As one of my first "skunkworks" engagements with Deloitte, I joined the project first as a consultant and then as an embedded fractional Creative Director, participating in team meetings and working alongside Deloitte’s consultants rather than operating as an external creative resource.

The team funded my research into emerging consumer behaviours, automation, international retail models, and the changing relationship between physical and digital shopping. That proximity meant research, strategy, and creative exploration could develop together, allowing emerging insights to quickly become tangible ideas.

Define

The resulting concept was Le Marché, an imagined supermarket built around a simple premise: after months of isolation, perhaps the future of physical retail should give people more reasons to come together, not fewer. (The name itself was something of an inside joke, but the concept behind it was serious.)

Drawing on my experience of South Korea’s mixed-use retail culture, where large markets often coexist with independent vendors, food stalls, and communal spaces, I reimagined the supermarket as a destination rather than simply a place to buy groceries.

Le Marché combined traditional grocery retail with spaces for local businesses, farmers, dining, live music, and community gathering. A hydroponic green wall brought food production into the customer experience, allowing shoppers to see some of what they purchased being grown within the store itself.

But the future of grocery wasn’t only happening on the shop floor.

The rapid growth of online ordering meant the traditional back-of-house environment also needed to change. I researched emerging robotic picking systems, their physical requirements, and how automated fulfilment could be incorporated into existing supermarket architecture.

The resulting design treated front-of-house experience and back-of-house automation as parts of the same system, exploring how a store could become more human for the people visiting it while becoming more automated behind the scenes.

Activate

To make Le Marché something stakeholders could experience rather than simply imagine, I designed and built the concept as an immersive virtual reality environment.

The VR walkthrough allowed stakeholders to move through the proposed store, experience customer journeys at human scale, understand the relationship between community and retail spaces, and explore how automated fulfilment could coexist with traditional grocery operations.

Instead of presenting the future as a deck of speculative ideas, we could effectively walk people through it.

The prototype became a strategic conversation tool, allowing Deloitte and its client to discuss, challenge, and refine possible futures before committing to the enormous investment required to build them.

Outcome

Le Marché demonstrated how speculative design can turn uncertainty into something an organization can actually interrogate.

Rather than attempting to predict exactly what the post-pandemic supermarket would become, the project explored several forces already reshaping grocery retail: changing customer behaviour, the growth of online fulfilment, automation, localism, and a renewed desire for shared physical experiences.

By bringing those ideas together in an explorable environment, we gave stakeholders a common vision around which more concrete strategic conversations could happen.

What this project reinforced

Designers can't predict the future, but we can try to understand how people are changing.

Yes, technology can transform how a business operates, but human behaviour ultimately determines whether those innovations matter. There was an interesting tension at Le Marché: balancing physical and digital retail, increasing automation behind the scenes while increasing humanity out front.

By combining research, strategic thinking, experience design, and immersive prototyping, we could make an uncertain future tangible enough to question it before investing in it.