This egg timer iPhone app was created by Crispin Porter + Bogusky Europe for Swedish sandwich spread Kalles Kaviar.
The idea behind the app is to assist users in boiling the perfect egg. It even puts together a playlist, that when finished, means your egg is ready.
It’s clearly a hit with caviar/egg lovers as the app has already had more than 50,000 downloads and is the third most downloaded in the free app section in the Swedish iTunes AppStore.
Homeplus turns a familiar commuter moment into a shopping moment.
Instead of asking people to visit a store, Homeplus brings the store to where people already wait. In the subway.
The virtual store appears as a life-size shelf display on station walls. Products are shown like a real aisle, complete with packaging visuals and clear selection cues.
The value is not novelty. It is time leverage. Shopping happens in minutes that normally get wasted.
The experience is deliberately simple.
A commuter scans product codes with a smartphone, adds items to a basket, and completes the order digitally. Delivery then happens to the home address.
That flow changes the meaning of convenience. The store is no longer a destination. It becomes an interface layer that can be placed anywhere footfall exists.
In high-density urban retail, the strongest convenience plays capture existing dwell time instead of trying to create new store visits.
It is tempting to frame this as a QR-code story. That misses the point.
The strategic innovation is contextual retail design.
Homeplus places the catalog where time is available, reduces friction to scan, pay, and deliver, and treats the physical environment as media and distribution at once.
The subway becomes a high-intent moment. People have time, they are idle, and they are already in a routine. Retail becomes a habit stitched into commuting.
This concept highlights a shift that becomes increasingly important.
Retail experiences are not confined to stores or screens. They can be embedded into everyday environments where attention is naturally available.
For leaders, the question becomes where the best micro-windows of time exist in customers’ lives, and what a purchase flow looks like when it fits perfectly into those windows.
Homeplus shows that an aisle is a navigational model. It does not have to live inside a store.
Once that is accepted, the design space expands. Aisles can be printed. Aisles can be projected. Aisles can appear in transit, at events, or in high-dwell environments.
The pattern is consistent. Retail becomes more modular. Distribution becomes more creative. Convenience becomes a design discipline.
It is a life-size “aisle” display in a transit environment where commuters scan products with a phone and order delivery to home.
A fast scan-to-basket flow that turns waiting time into a purchase moment, with fulfillment doing the heavy lifting after the scan.
Operational reliability in fulfillment. If delivery fails, the experience collapses because the shopper has no store fallback.
The strategic innovation is placing a commerce interface inside a high-dwell routine, using the physical environment as both media and distribution.
In mobile-first consumer marketing, the strongest activations often take a screen-based behavior and make it public, physical, and shareable. T-Mobile’s Angry Birds Live is a clean example of that move.
T-Mobile, together with Saatchi & Saatchi, capitalized on the Angry Birds fever with a viral video titled Angry Birds Live.
In a square in Barcelona, they created a human-scaled mockup of Angry Birds. Lucky participants used the game on a smartphone to launch birds on their castle-smashing journey. The experience included authentic sound effects and exploding pigs, and the size of the crowd made it clear the spectacle worked.
The mechanism was simple and instantly legible. The smartphone stayed the input device, but the output moved into the real world.
That pairing did two things at once. It kept the interaction familiar for participants, and it made the result visible for everyone watching. One person played. Everyone else experienced the payoff.
People do not gather around an app. They gather around consequences.
Angry Birds already trained players to anticipate impact. By scaling the environment up and making destruction physical, the activation delivered the same emotional beat as the game, but with stronger social proof because it happened in front of a crowd.
The business intent was to borrow cultural momentum and convert it into attention that looked earned, not bought.
The activation created a story people wanted to film, share, and talk about. The brand got reach through the crowd, the recordings, and the viral video itself, rather than relying on a traditional media push alone.
A live brand activation in Barcelona that recreated Angry Birds at human scale, with participants using a smartphone to launch birds at a physical set.
A familiar mobile game interaction controlled real-world outcomes, turning individual play into a public spectacle.
Because the results were physical, loud, and visible. People gathered around impact and consequence, not a screen.
Capturing cultural momentum and converting it into earned attention, shareable content, and viral reach.
Make one person’s action entertaining for many, and design the payoff to be obvious, physical, and easy to record.
