The Covid-19 pandemic has seen retail clients urgently looking at new and inventive ways to launch their products as more and more people are going into self isolation and high street giants including Apple have closed their stores around the world. Product launches which have been in the diary for over 18 months are now being cancelled across the globe and precautions are being put in place to keep citizens safe from the outbreak.

Keziah Wildsmith is the founder of event design company Heaps + Stacks who put on over 150 events globally a year. Many of their clients are some of the biggest retail names.

Retail brands that are launching products are having to urgently reassess how they do this with event design companies creating new ways of launching the products in light of the Covid-19 outbreak. Speaking of the impact Covid-19 is having on retail businesses and launches, Keziah Wildsmith warned:

“We have seen a rise over the last 48 hours from some of our global clients who are quite rightly taking the Covid-19 outbreak very seriously. Whilst we would normally be putting on experiential events in cities around the globe we are now having to work around the clock to deliver product launches for clients without physically bringing people together.

“My global team have been working to bring the client’s products and ideas to life without using the events we had planned. One of our high-street retail clients will now be live streaming an event next week and they have dramatically scaled back the amount of people attending. They will now only have a handful of celebrities at the event, the products will be couriered to the guest list and the celebrities will be remotely discussing the product via live stream directly to the guests in their homes. Normally it would be an immersive press day in central London attended by some of the UK’s most influential figures both within the celebrity arena as well as leading influencers and journalists.”