Bringing a piece of Seoul to an Italian train station.
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For the new Yepoda pop-up store at Bologna Centrale, 23Bassi draws inspiration from an image that is more closely associated with everyday life in Korea than with the traditional world of cosmetics: the convenience store.
Small stores that are always open, well-stocked shelves, well-lit refrigerators, colorful packaging, and products arranged in an easy-to-find manner.
The project takes this language and applies it to the beauty retail sector.
The result is a compact, fresh, and highly recognizable pop-up store, where skincare and makeup are displayed as if they were products just taken off the shelves of a small market in Seoul.
The design concept stems from a fusion of ideas.
Instead of building a traditional beauty store, we used some of the most recognizable elements of Korean convenience stores and completely changed their contents.
The shelves are designed to look like large display refrigerators: rounded frames, built-in lighting, light-colored surfaces, and products arranged in very dense rows.
What would normally hold drinks, snacks, or fresh produce thus becomes a way to showcase the Yepoda skincare routine.
The language is intentionally informal.
It’s just that there aren’t any soft drinks in the fridge.
There are serums, creams, masks, and cushion foundations.
One of the most ironic elements of the project is displayed right in the store window.
The classic horizontal ice cream freezer has been reimagined as a display case for Yepoda cushions.
It’s the same process as at a convenience store: you walk up, look around, and make your choice.
But the product changes completely.
The counter thus serves simultaneously as a testing station, a display, and a decorative element in the storefront window.
An item normally associated with food retail makes its way into the beauty industry and immediately creates a little surprise.
It is precisely this ambiguity that makes the concept understandable even to those who are just passing through the station.
The display system, too, is deliberately modeled after that of small grocery stores.
The stackable boxes, in the brand’s signature pink color, serve as containers for masks and other Yepoda products.
The product isn’t simply placed on a shelf: it’s picked up, stacked, and arranged just like merchandise in a small grocery store.
The colors of the packaging thus become an integral part of the space’s design.
Pink, lilac, green, light blue, and yellow create an intuitive and highly visual user experience.
Some physical products are also enlarged and redesigned, becoming elements of communication and wayfinding.
Packaging is no longer just what people buy.
Become part of the store’s architecture.
The floor, too, is inspired by an everyday image.
A checkered pattern in pastel colors runs throughout the entire pop-up store, reinforcing the feeling that you’ve stepped into a reimagined small convenience store.
There’s no need to create a literal depiction of Korea.
All it takes is a few very specific signs.
The crates.
Refrigerators.
The floor.
Neon lights.
The density of the product.
Taken together, these elements immediately convey an image that is different from that of a traditional beauty store.
Bologna Centrale is a fast-paced place.
People don’t necessarily come here to shop; they’re on their way somewhere.
That’s why the project needs to be able to explain itself in just a few seconds.
The large glass opening keeps the pop-up store fully visible to passersby, while the Yepoda pink creates an instantly recognizable presence within the station’s historic architecture.
Inside, however, the layout is simple and intuitive.
Products, testers, and categories must be easy to understand even during a brief stop between trains.
The convenience store thus becomes not only an aesthetic reference point but also a functional one: walk in, figure it out, make a choice, and walk out.
Yepoda officially describes the pop-up as an experience designed to make K-Beauty simple, fun, and easy to discover. The brand chose one of Italy’s most important rail hubs specifically to bring this experience to a very broad and dynamic audience.
For 23Bassi, the project thus becomes a small exercise in cultural translation.
Don’t copy a Korean convenience store.
But to identify the most interesting trends and use them to create a new beauty format.
The refrigerator becomes a display.
The freezer becomes a tester.
The fruit crate becomes a display stand.
Packaging becomes signage.
And for a few minutes, as I walk between the tracks, Bologna seems a little closer to Seoul.
Photo: Courtesy of Yepoda.
The project grew out of the evolution of the project created for Yepoda at Sephoria in Milan
Here’s the article about the Beauty Biz project
Here’s the article on the Yepoda website
