On February 18, 2021, in an extraordinary moment for global space exploration and the scientific community, the NASA Perseverance rover made a flawless landing on Mars to the eruption of applause by the NASA team that made it happen. After more than 6 months of travel and nearly 300 million miles, Perseverance navigated treacherous terrain marked by sand dunes, steep cliffs, boulders, and small craters to make a pinpoint landing in a 28-mile-wide ancient lake bed and river delta. The spacecraft’s heat shield endured peak temperatures of 2,370 degrees Fahrenheit and traveled at 12,000 miles per hour before having to slow down to 1.7 miles per hour over a 7-minute period during which it had no communication with the NASA team on Earth. Perseverance’s historic landing brought back memories of a consumer electronics POP display we created a few years ago.
We took an instant liking to ROMO, a small robot comprised of an iPhone that sat in a cradle flanked by tractor treads designed to operate in the same type of rugged terrain that Perseverance encountered on Mars. Not only was ROMO mobile, but he was cute and friendly. He could make facial expressions and show off his personality. Romo was also helpful. If you watch this video, you’ll see how ROMO helped us build his own POP consumer electronic retail display.
We dubbed this project “Saving ROMO” because our challenge was to create an environment for ROMO with all of the outer space trappings that would make him feel at home during his time here on Earth. The environment needed to be secure so kid shoppers could watch ROMO move around and express himself but not touch him. We had to be able to duplicate the environment since ROMO was being put up for adoption in 220 Brookstone stores for the initial rollout.
From a merchandising perspective, our ROMO retail display was one of many of our tabletop displays designed to stop traffic and capture the imagination of shoppers young and old. It was a unique combination of art and engineering. The display featured a folded acrylic frame, a blow molded acrylic dome, an airbrushed latex moonscape, a 7″ digital media player, LED lighting, fully integrated electronics to support a live ROMO robot, and digitally printed graphics that focused on the unique messaging of the ROMO brand.
The ROMO consumer electronic retail display was fun to design and build. It generated sales that exceeded expectations. Like other effective retail store displays, it told a story and made the product stand out among the myriad of products vying for a shopper’s attention. By having a live ROMO robot that could move around and make facial expressions, the display accomplished its objective of focusing the attention on the product rather than the display. Like many of our custom retail display projects, we produced the display under a very tight timeline which we made thanks to the help of our friend ROMO.