When New Balance opened its first West Coast flagship at The Grove in Los Angeles, the store came with two full weekends of programming built around it, a listening lounge, an Ellipse Café pop-up, a capsule vending machine giveaway, and a fully wrapped Majestic photo booth stationed right in the middle of it all possible through our Brand Activation program. Guests walked out with New Balance shopping bags in one hand and a fresh photo strip in the other, and that second detail is the one worth paying attention to.
A Flagship Worth Making an Event Of
A first West Coast flagship isn't a routine store opening, it's a statement. The Grove gave New Balance a stage built for exactly that kind of arrival: high foot traffic, a built-in audience of shoppers already primed to wander from storefront to storefront, and enough open plaza space to run a full weekend of programming instead of a single ribbon-cutting photo. The listening lounge and the café pop-up gave people a reason to slow down. The capsule machine gave them a reason to come back the next day. The photo booth gave them a reason to bring a piece of it home.
That's the role Majestic was brought in to play, not the headline of the weekend, but the part of it guests actually carried out the door.
The Setup
This one booth went all in on New Balance's own branding rather than Majestic's usual look. The exterior panel is a glossy New Balance red, the flying chevron logo lit up front and center, paired with warm wood paneling and a deep red curtain instead of Majestic's typical palette. Every photostrip that came out of it was custom-printed with "Los Angeles" across the border and the New Balance logo, a small detail that turned a keepsake into a piece of branded merchandise guests chose to keep. As always, the booth stayed fully enclosed. Majestic doesn't run open-air setups, even for a high-traffic retail activation like this one, the curtain and the privacy it creates are part of what makes the format work. If this enclosed photo booth set up interests you, let’s talk.
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The Line Never Really Stopped
Across both weekends, the booth pulled a steady line of its own, distinct from the register lines and the vending machine giveaway. Groups of friends squeezed in four at a time, elbows and shopping bags and all. A mother and daughter came out comparing their strips before either one made it to the register. A pair of coworkers ducked in still holding onto new sneaker boxes, laughing before the curtain had even fully closed behind them. The energy inside stayed exactly what you'd want from a flagship opening: loud, a little chaotic, entirely genuine.
That's the same immediate, unposed quality Majestic looks for in every install, the half-second before the pose lands, the laugh that wasn't planned, just turned up to opening-weekend volume. Nobody in these photos looks like they're performing for a camera. They look like they're at a party that happens to have a photo booth in it, which is exactly the effect a flagship opening is going for.
Why This One Leads With the Keepsake
New Balance has used the Ellipse concept before, in a separate activation at Dick's House of Sport in Tampa. This piece isn't about repeating that story, it's about what happened after the Grove doors closed each night. A flagship grand opening is built around a single high-energy weekend, and the easiest thing in the world would be for everything about it to end when the last vending-machine capsule was claimed. It didn't. Every guest who stepped into the booth walked away with a printed strip in hand, which meant a piece of the activation kept living on refrigerators, in wallets, and pinned to corkboards long after the weekend wrapped. A photo op on a screen disappears the moment someone closes the app. A printed strip doesn't, and that's the gap a booth like this is built to close, the same idea covered in more depth in why brand activations shoppers actually remember tend to give people something physical to walk away with.
The Case for Staying Enclosed
Every Majestic booth is fully enclosed, and a retail crowd this size is exactly where that pays off. The curtain gives a group of friends, or a mother and daughter, or two coworkers still holding their shopping bags, a genuinely private, unposed minute together in the middle of a packed plaza. That minute is where the real photos come from, the ones that look like a moment instead of a marketing photo. Scale that across a full weekend of flagship foot traffic and the enclosed format is doing a lot of quiet work: giving hundreds of guests the same intimate, candid experience no matter how loud or crowded the rest of the opening gets. That's the same thinking behind why luxury events keep choosing vintage-style booths over open-air setups, the format itself is what makes the moment feel considered rather than incidental.
What Outlasted Opening Weekend
By the time the capsule machine emptied out and the last listening-lounge playlist wound down, the photo booth had quietly done something the rest of the weekend's programming couldn't: sent a piece of the event home with almost everyone who walked through it. A flagship opening is, by nature, a temporary thing. The booth gave New Balance a way to make part of it permanent, one printed strip at a time. If you want to make your event unforgettable like this, reach out to us and let’s create memories together.
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