I came across a video recently from a Barbie-branded ice skating experience (or rather, from what was advertised as one). The image shows a standard warehouse space strung with pink banners, a few cardboard cutouts of Barbie positioned at odd angles, and a rink that, by most accounts, was underwhelming at best. Tickets had not been cheap. The Instagram posts had promised celebrities and magic. What arrived was something closer to a primary school disco, if the primary school had charged forty dollars at the door.
This is not a new story. It has just been happening with increasing frequency, and with a particular kind of audacity that feels worth examining. Not just because the events themselves are bad, but because of what they reveal about how we got here. I can only attribute the rise of these scenarios partially to the slow disappearance of the places where we used to simply go, and the vacuum that branded spectacle has rushed in to fill.
A brief history of the grift
Case Studies in Disappointment
The pattern is consistent enough that it almost constitutes a genre. A recognizable IP or aesthetic. Promotional imagery that looks extraordinary (often, now, generated or heavily retouched). Tickets priced at the level of "an experience," which is to say: more than a cinema, less than a flight. And then, the event itself. Which is, almost always, a room.
The entire product was the marketing itself. The event was never really the point.
The design problem at the centre of it
Bad experience design is both bad execution and a fundamental misunderstanding of what an experience is supposed to do. The best experiences, like a great restaurant, a well-designed museum, a music festival that actually works, are not about spectacle delivered to a passive audience. They are about creating conditions in which people can feel, do, and connect. The design serves those conditions. The physical space, the pacing, the sensory detail, and the moments of surprise is all in service of how the person in it will feel.
The warehouse experiences get this precisely backwards. They begin with an aesthetic (the Wonka look, the Barbie palette) and attempt to backwards-engineer an experience from it. Hang enough pink things, and surely the experience will follow. It does not. What follows is a room with things in it, which is not an experience at all. It is a set.
The difference is whether design decisions were made for the person standing in the space, or for the photograph that person might take while standing there. Increasingly, it is the latter. When the primary output of an experience is an Instagram post or a TikTok video, the physical reality becomes almost incidental. The render is the product. The warehouse is just where you stand to take the picture.
Third places and their absence
Sociologist Ray Oldenburg wrote about "third places" in 1989. These are spaces that are neither home nor work, where people gather without agenda or transaction. The pub. The park. The library. The main street. The town square. These are places you go not to have an experience but simply to be present, in public, among other people. Their value is incidental, accumulative, and largely free.
In the decades since, third places have been disappearing at pace. Rising rents have closed independent shops and local venues. Council funding cuts have reduced libraries and community centres. Car-centric urban planning has made public space hostile to lingering. The main street has hollowed out. The park remains, but the café beside it is now a chain, and the chain has the warmth of a loading screen.
The gap this leaves is real. Humans need to gather. We need places to go that are not our homes and not our offices. We need places with a mild but genuine texture, that feel like somewhere. When those places contract, the desire accumulates. And eventually, it meets a branded event promising exactly the feeling of going somewhere special.
We have replaced the experience of simply being somewhere with the performance of having been there.
This is the deeper transaction happening in the warehouse events. Instead of selling a skate rink or a Chocolate Factory, they are selling the feeling of having somewhere to go. The problem is that feeling cannot be manufactured by hanging banners. It is a quality that accrues through time, through use, and through community. A one-off ticketed pop-up, by definition, cannot provide these.
What good experience design actually looks like
Thankfully, there are instructive counterexamples. The best immersive experiences share a quality of deep specificity. Every detail in service of one thing. A point of view executed with commitment. It provides a space to inhabited over being photographed.
Good experience design starts with the question: how should a person feel two hours from now, when they are on the bus home? Not, what will they post? Not, what does the moodboard look like? What is the emotional residue of this? That question implies a hundred design decisions, made carefully, in sequence: spatial pacing, sensory contrast, and moments of stillness and surprise. And, most importantly, a beginning and an end that feel intentional.
The warehouse experiences rarely ask this question because the answer, honestly, would complicate the budget conversation. Genuine experience design is expensive, and not just in material terms. It requires time, iteration, expertise, and a willingness to discard things that look good on a mood board but do not work in the room. It requires people who understand both design and human behaviour, and who have the authority to say "This is not ready".
The accountability gap
One of the odder features of this moment is how predictable the outrage cycle has become, and how little it seems to deter the next event. The Willy Wonka experience went viral within hours of opening (oh boy, how can we forget the memes?). The organizers issued a partial refund. Six months later, a new version of the same concept had been announced in a different city. The incentive structure is, apparently, intact.
Part of this is that the internet's appetite for failure content is, if anything, a more reliable marketing mechanism than success. The Fyre Festival is, by most measures, more famous than most genuine festivals. The Wonka warehouse was seen by millions who never bought a ticket. There is a version of this in which going viral for being terrible is slowly becoming a business model. The PR cost of a disappointed crowd is offset against the free impressions of their outrage.
This should make us slightly uncomfortable about our own role in it. Every shared photograph of the sad signage, every mocking thread, every documentary is, in some small way, completing the transaction the original marketing attempted. The spectacle works, even when the event does not.
Somewhere to actually be
The answer to this is not, ultimately, better-designed branded experiences (though that would be a start). It is third places. It is the reinvestment in the kinds of spaces that do not require you to buy a ticket or perform enjoyment for a camera. Spaces that are a little rough around the edges, belonging to no one in particular, where the point is simply to be present.
These spaces are a planning and funding problem as much as a design one. They require local policy, sustained investment, and a view of public space that values lingering as legitimate (and not insidiously branded as "loitering"). Yes, the solutions are "boring". They are less photogenic than a pink warehouse and considerably harder to monetize. They are also, reliably, what people actually need.
Fostering third places requires local policy, sustained investment, and a view of public space that values lingering as legitimate (and not insidiously branded as "loitering")
Until we have more of them, the warehouses will keep going up. And they will keep being disappointing. And we will keep being surprised, which is perhaps the most telling part. We keep arriving with genuine hope, proof that the desire they are exploiting is entirely real, and entirely unmet.