CGI’d London Pre-Opening Storefront Suggests What Could Really Be Done On Windows

January 6, 2025 by Dave Haynes

This is just a CGI job, but what’s interesting about this retail storefront concept is that could be pretty easily done – unlike some earlier clickbait-ish social media posts that looked cool but were either impractical or almost impossible to pull off in real life.

It was promoting a store opening for a new London outpost of a Danish outerwear retailer called Rains, so  the marketing team came up with a CGI’d video that made the empty storefront appear like it was raining inside. Simple but clever, and communicates the brand’s focus.

Here’s a video (hat tip store designer Nuno Antunes) …

This is what the real hoarding looked like:

And this is the store open:

As mentioned up top, what’s interesting here is that this could be done these days with projection film (though only at night) or all day long using mesh LED tech from companies like ClearLED, Muxwave or i5LED. That’s essentially a super-thin foil-like product that either sites immediately inside windows, or aeven adheres to the window glass on the inside. It looks like perforated, printed vinyl from the inside, but it is active.

This is an example of that, lit up recently in Toronto.

I am most definitely not a retailer, and this could be a gloriously stupid idea: but at least in theory this is the sort of thing that could be used pre and post-opening of a store, even if the active stuff was mostly just used after-hours.