Lunar New Year and O‑Week, looks at first glance like yet another casual café: counter, menu, staff in on-theme uniforms. But nothing on the menu is edible. Instead, students and city workers are invited to “order” Lunar New Year‑inspired favourites that arrive not in a paper bag but as plush collectables to keep. The premise is disarmingly simple. Rather than lining up at a shelf, visitors step into a scene. “Plushie artisans” theatrically “cook” each order, playing out the choreography of service – taking orders, assembling, calling out names – with a knowing wink. The transaction itself is short, but the experience has layers: a hit of nostalgia, a moment of play borrowed from hospitality, the pleasure of walking away with a physical memento rather than a half‑finished latte. For a CBD centre, this kind of activation does more than fill a tenancy between leases. It gives people a reason to detour, to linger, to pull out their phones. It’s retail as spectacle, engineered around the idea that in a world of endless scroll, you come into the city not just to buy something, but to feel something. Inside the Jellycat universe If MC Takeaway is a local experiment, Jellycat has already taken retail theatre global. The British soft toy brand has built an entire ecosystem of food‑themed pop‑ups and counters that turn buying a plush into a minor pilgrimage. At high‑end department stores and key partners, fans queue at branded kiosks that borrow from the visual language of dining: fish‑and‑chips counters in London, pastel pâtisseries in Paris, diners and cafés elsewhere. The mechanics are consistent. You don’t just pick up a toy; you “order” it from a menu. Staff “prepare” your jelly behind the counter, then present it in special packaging, often with event‑only extras – a particular bag, a pin, a sticker that quietly signals “I was there”. The spaces are styled down to the last prop, calibrated for photos and short videos. The result is a purchase that doubles as a memory and a post. Crucially, Jellycat’s audience is not just children. The brand sits squarely inside a broader “kidult” movement that has reshaped the toy category. Adults – particularly women – have become a growth engine for plush, treating soft toys as comfort objects, décor and self‑expression rather than something to age out of at 12. In a period marked by political and economic unease, small, joy‑filled purchases have turned into a kind of everyday coping mechanism. Retail theatre plugs straight into that impulse: it gives you permission to indulge, and frames the indulgence as an experience rather than a guilty secret. The joy factor and the new store brief Analysts have started to describe this convergence of entertainment, collectability and emotion as retail’s “joy factor” – a useful shorthand for what’s really going on. The MC Takeaway counter and Jellycat’s kiosks are products of the same logic: if a shopper can get the item online, the store has to offer something the site cannot. That something is theatre. For landlords and brands, the business case runs deeper than social content. Short‑run concepts drive repeat visits, giving centres and high streets a rolling calendar of “what’s on” rather than a static directory, while immersive sets function as three‑dimensional brand worlds that communicate humour, values and personality more effectively than a standard gondola. Tightly edited, collectible ranges attached to these experiences can also support healthier margins than yet another round of discounting, and for categories like toys, gifting and even beauty, theatre‑first formats offer a way to capitalise on the adult‑collector trend without alienating core family audiences. What ties these examples together is a move away from the purely transactional. Retail theatre asks more from store teams: a willingness to play a role, to improvise, to handle queues of fans who have travelled for a particular drop. It demands more from design and operations, too, from visual storytelling through to line management and merchandising that can withstand being touched, photographed and rearranged all day. The risk, of course, is gimmickry – an Instagram backdrop with no real idea behind it. The brands that are getting it right are clear about their centre of gravity. MC Takeaway riffs on Melbourne’s food culture and the ritual of ordering; Jellycat’s counters lean into the absurdity and reassurance of comfort food and soft toys. The theatre grows out of the brand, rather than being bolted on. For physical retail, the stakes are high. As more everyday spending migrates online, the question is no longer whether stores will survive, but what kind of stores will be worth the trip. The rise of retail theatre suggests one answer: places where shoppers are not just customers, but an audience – and where the memory of the moment is as valuable as the product they carry home. Further reading: Profits double: How toymaker Jellycat made plushies a high-margin business