“After the pop-up last year, we did see a very large bump in our revenue in the L.A. area. Where we saw a lot of gain and traction was in brand awareness in the area, and that was evidenced by the traffic and the conversion that we saw come through our site during and after that time.”
—Elizabeth Money, SVP-Brand and Creative, BÉIS
The BÉIS Hotel offered consumers the chance to interact with the brand’s products in a travel-themed setting.
For more than just packing travel essentials, luggage has become its own fashion statement, with the features and tech to match. The industry shift is driving brands like BÉIS, a d-to-c brand popular on social media, to create moments for fans to get their hands on its collections of suitcases, backpacks and totes they see in their feeds every day.
Following up on its ROI-generating The BÉIS Motel pop-up in The Grove in Los Angeles last year, BÉIS this year decided to elevate the experience with The BÉIS Hotel, a pop-up that traveled to three cities and offered photo ops, engagements and product showcases. The BÉIS Hotel tour touched down for several weeks in each market, kicking off in L.A. in July and then heading to Vancouver in August. It will wrap in Dallas this month on Sept. 28.
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One of the goals for BÉIS, which was launched in 2018 by actress Shay Mitchell, was to boost brand awareness (who could miss the beige building-sized luggage façade on L.A.’s Abbot Kinney Boulevard?) and allow consumers to see and feel its core products in a travel-themed setting. In The BÉIS Hotel lobby, brand ambassadors welcomed attendees and showed them to a speakeasy-esque faux elevator with a mirrored wall that prompted selfies. From there, participants walked up to a wooden hotel door with a branded door hanger and key, leading into a modern, cream-colored and light wood-paneled suite.
Different areas of the hotel room modeled uses for purchasable BÉIS rollers, weekenders, duffle bags, work totes, backpacks, sport packs and accessories, with corresponding table-top signage listing product names, features, dimensions, reviews and available colors. Attendees could pick up a beige rotary phone on the nightstand to “give us a ring for a sweet surprise” and venture out to the balcony’s flower-accented lounge space for a little R&R.
Keeping with the theme, events at The BÉIS Hotel were called “Room Service” during the day and “Turndown Service” in the evening. The L.A. pop-up offered Personalization Wednesday with hand-painted monograms from Lefty’s Right Mind, Spa Day Saturday with chair massages and nail art, and a happy hour with tequila seltzer brand Onda.
Accessed through a faux elevator, the BÉIS suite displayed purchasable products alongside signage with product names, features, dimensions, reviews and available colors.
“I’d definitely say the elevator was probably people’s highlight,” says Elizabeth Money, svp-brand and creative at BÉIS. “The space was this beautiful, very clean aesthetic and also super cozy and comfortable. It was a nice place for people to land and hang out for a little bit. We were really thinking about the dwell time because we wanted people to stick around and feel like they entered a destination, like we just transported them somewhere else.”
The L.A. and Dallas pop-ups were similar in their design of The BÉIS Hotel, with the layouts adjusted to fit the different spaces and the incorporation of Easter eggs unique to each city. For instance, there was a backdrop of the L.A. or Dallas skyline on the balcony and a branded newspaper with articles tailored to the city. But the Vancouver activation called for a modified experience since it was based inside an actual hotel, the Fairmont Pacific Rim. Instead, it focused on an airline-inspired theme with BÉIS luggage stored in overhead bins, a branded beverage cart, airplane seats and plane window wall graphics.
“After the pop-up last year, we did see a very large bump in our revenue in the L.A. area,” Money says. “Where we saw a lot of gain and traction was in brand awareness in the area, and that was evidenced by the traffic and the conversion that we saw come through our site during and after that time. We did a lot of different activations around that, too, and our first billboards, as well.”
Outside the BÉIS suite, participants could lounge in a balcony space themed to the location in L.A. and Dallas.
With L.A. being its biggest market, BÉIS looked at other large U.S. markets with potential for growth, identifying Dallas but also considering Miami, Atlanta and Chicago, which are areas for future activations. Internationally, Vancouver was a hot market for expansion, likely spurred by co-founder Mitchell’s Canadian background, Money says.
When looking for the right locations for the pop-ups within these cities, the BÉIS team wanted venues with ample space to allow for more inventory of products for purchase on-site. In 2022, the team was surprised by the number of attendees who wanted to buy and roll their new suitcases right out of the pop-up shop.
“We wanted to still keep this hospitality moment of feeling like you’re welcome into the space and not really feeling like you’re in a retail store—feeling like you are experiencing something rather than you’re just going somewhere and shopping,” Money says. “We were trying to see if the [pop-up] areas or demographics are purchasing one type of product over another. Like in Vancouver, we’ve seen a lot of heavy backpack sales in city areas, so we definitely had a better selection of our backpacks there.”
In Dallas, BÉIS offered a trade-in program, in which attendees could bring their old luggage and trade it in for a discounted BÉIS product. The brand would take care of properly disposing the turned-in luggage. Being mindful of Vancouver’s hotel location and the fact that most participants would be traveling and on the go, BÉIS luggage was on display and only available to purchase with a ship-to-home option, rather than pick up on-site.
From the promotional content to the placement of products within the branded hotel suite, Money says it was all part of a 360-degree thought process that made sure “everything was incredibly photographable” and capitalized on social sharing and trends among its audience.
“It’s always thinking of the ways that we can incorporate our branding and our product use cases into the actual activation. We want it to be literal, but we also want it to be experiential and relatable,” she says. “I don’t know that we ever want to go down the road of having like a true, true brick-and-mortar presence, but through this experiential marketing type of vibe, we can really show our personality in different aspects.” Agency: MKG.
Step inside The BÉIS Hotel:
Photo credit: Flannery Underwood, Underwood Studios
