Renovated Hugo Boss Store Adds Split Flap Display To Shopper Experience On London’s Regent Street

March 8, 2023 by Dave Haynes

Here’s an example of an electro-mechanical display being used in high-end retail for interesting and different messaging, in this case for a newly renovated HUGO BOSS store on  Regent Street in London.

It is supplied by Vestaboard, a Silicon Valley start-up that specializes in split flap displays that share the same core design and operating idea of the chattering informational boards from rail stations and airports of the past. There are also flip-dot and slip-disc displays out there, using circles instead of squares/rectangles.

I like the old-school experience of these things and they definitely draw attention. But they involve a lot of moving parts and are not cheap at $3,300 USD. In a Hugo Boss flagship, that $3,300 is probably nothing in terms of the overall build-out cost, but for a micro-brewery’s bar or other space where budgets are modest, the visual experience could be pretty effectively emulated in software and creative, and audio that creates the chattering sound of information changing.

The Belgian firm PresentationPoint – best known for using Microsoft PowerPoint as the foundation for digital signage presentations – last year announced Split-Flap TV, a cloud-based toolset that makes electro-mechanical display-like experiences possible on conventional flat panel displays.