Making Software You Can Touch Before You Buy
OVERVIEW
A Touchscreen Bridge From the Shelf to the Software
Services
Fixture and Hardware Design
Interactive Design and Installation Development
Multi-Region Rollout Planning
Pilot Program Strategy
Product Content System
Retail Experience Design
Adobe sells creative software in stores, but a retail shelf can only show so much. The thing that makes Adobe worth buying, what the products actually do, lives on a screen the shopper cannot see while standing in a store. That gap between the shelf and the software is the problem retail has always had with digital products.
Adobe partnered with Wrecking Ball to close it. We designed and built an interactive retail experience pairing a merchandised product wall with a touchscreen that lets shoppers explore Adobe’s full creative lineup, then scan to get the product on the spot. This first build is a pilot, engineered to roll out across additional regions in the United States and worldwide.
THE CHALLENGE
Sell Software You Cannot Demo, in a Space Built for Product Key Cards
Adobe needed a retail presence that could do what a shelf cannot: show the work, not just the packaging. The challenge was to make digital products tangible in a physical environment, hold Adobe’s brand standards exactly, and build the whole thing as a repeatable system rather than a one-off fixture.
A pilot carries a double mandate. It has to win on the floor today, engaging a shopper, explaining a product, driving a purchase, and it has to be designed from the start to be manufactured, shipped, and deployed across markets with different footprints and languages. Beautiful once is not the brief. Beautiful and repeatable is.
THE SOLUTION
A Display You Watch and a Screen You Explore
An Interactive Product Explorer
We designed a touch-first interface that lets shoppers browse Adobe’s entire creative lineup by product, open any one to see what it does, its features, its presets, its capabilities, and understand the value that a product key card on a shelf could never communicate. The pro tool becomes legible to a first-time shopper in a few taps.
A Creative Types Hook
The experience opens on Adobe’s Creative Types idea, inviting shoppers to discover their creative strengths rather than starting on a hard sell. Curiosity pulls people to the screen, and the product exploration follows naturally from there.
Shelf-to-Download Handoff
Every product page carries a QR code that bridges the physical display to the digital purchase, so a shopper can scan and get any product, the moment they are interested. The retail floor becomes the top of the funnel instead of a dead end.
Engineered for Rollout
We translated Adobe’s identity into a physical fixture, color, hero brand artwork, typography, and engineered the unit as a repeatable system built for manufacture and deployment, so the pilot could scale across regions rather than be rebuilt for each market.
THE RESULT
A Pilot Built to Become a Program
Wrecking Ball delivered the pilot Adobe retail experience as a complete, deployable unit: brand, interactive touchscreen, product content, and merchandising engineered into one fixture. It makes digital products tangible on the floor while giving Adobe a system designed from day one to expand.
This first build is the template for what comes next, a retail program ready to roll out across additional U.S. and international markets, carrying a consistent, interactive Adobe brand experience wherever it lands.
BE DISruptive
The Art of the Impossible, Made Possible
Adobe needed to sell software in a space built for software activation cards, and it needed a system, not a single display. By making the products explorable by touch and bridging the shelf to the download, we turned a retail fixture into a working part of the funnel, and built it to scale from the first unit forward.
This project exemplifies our approach to experience design, interface, and production under one roof, where brand, touchscreen UX, and hardware run as one engagement built to travel from the pilot outward.
