Good Housekeeping Comes To The Mall Of America For A Holiday Season Pop-Up

Good Housekeeping is opening up a pop-up shop in the Mall of America running from early October through the end of December, aka the holiday shopping season.

Named GH Lab, the 2,800-square-foot shop will be a monument to experimental retail, designed to resemble a real home complete with dining and living room areas. They’ll even have a front door – because, after all, how better to bring home goods to the people than to feature them in something that is a home, or at least looks a whole lot like one? Apart from domestic ambiance, the store will feature more than 150 recommended products from 46 brands, including Affresh, Dyson, Instant Pot, Simple Pleasures and Xbox.

“We thought ‘go big or go home’ and work with the biggest mall,” said Jane Francisco, editor-in-chief of Good Housekeeping. “We are one of the largest female-facing media brands, and we really wanted our entire audience to be able to interact with this.”

The GH Institute is the testing arm of the Good Housekeeping brand – it reviews and ranks many thousands of products per year for the magazine, as well as for its associate web portals, Good Housekeeping Online and Green Good Housekeeping Seal. The pop-up shop brings brands the ability to not only get recommendations from the lab, but also to buy them directly.

Buy them, but not walk out of the shop with them, as one of the design features of the shop is that it will be shoppable with Amazon SmileCodes, which shoppers can use in the Amazon app to pay for their goods and have them delivered to their homes.

And in the spirit of Christmas miracles come early, a mall operator actually has something good to say about Amazon in 2018.

“Partnering with Good Housekeeping and Amazon allows us to bring experiential retail to life here at the mall. We are constantly looking for ways to keep Mall of America fresh and exciting,” said Jill Renslow, SVP of business development and marketing, Mall of America.

And the excitement is echoing throughout the project, it seems: Rachel Rothman, chief technologist of the GH Institute, noted her level of excitement as “insane” when it comes to melding what’s on the page at Good Housekeeping with the real world of commerce for readers.

Rothman will also travel to the Mall of America to train staff members on each of the products and why they are coming with the GH recommendation.

And for those who can’t quite make the trip out to the nation’s biggest mall for Christmas can also visit the digital version of the shop on Amazon through the GH-tested virtual storefront.

“We really wanted the entire experience to have a bit of an editorial feel. In this time of fake news and fake reviews, this is all science-backed testing,” Francisco said.