Brands Briefing: Are hotels the new brand showrooms?
This is the latest installment of the Brands Briefing, a weekly Modern Retail+ column about the growth strategies of modern brands. More from the series →
Checking into a hotel? You could receive a room key, a WiFi code and some branded gear.
Brands are using resorts and hotels as showrooms, betting on picturesque locales and luxurious getaways to market their products to new audiences. In February, Lela Rose, an American fashion designer, held a three-day après-ski pop-up at Caldera House in Wyoming, complete with hot chocolate, popcorn and a curated selection of Western merchandise. Meanwhile, this summer, heat pump company Quilt organized an influencer camp at Hotel Lilien in the Catskills Mountains. Quilt will use content from the activation in paid media over the next several months.
Brands are betting on hotel activations to stand out at a time in which traditional retail marketing channels are becoming crowded and costly. While consumers are still grappling with higher prices at the supermarket, many continue to seek out trips and experiences — especially Gen Z. According to the U.S. Travel Association, domestic travel spending is expected to grow 1% in 2026, accelerating to 3% in 2027 and 2028. PwC also found that people spend an average of $198 on shopping and souvenirs while on summer vacation. As brands see it, guests spend hours relaxing in hotels, figuring out what to see, eat or wear — which may make them more receptive to messaging.
“Hotels are service first,” said Erin Anderson, Lela Rose’s president and COO. “It’s hospitality, and we think about our brand and how to service a client through that same lens.”
There are plenty of examples of brands working with hotels over the years. Take the St. Regis hotel in Chicago, which partnered this summer with the British menswear brand Drake’s for an exclusive capsule collection of four accessories. Or Spanx, which launched its first resort capsule in July in collaboration with The Shelborne By Proper and Montauk Yacht Club. This year, Marriott began allowing customers to buy the same decor, linens and table settings used in its hotels. And in 2024, Draper James set up pop-ups at Hilton Graduate Hotels to appeal to families in town for sports games or parents’ weekends.
Quilt, which is trying to be the first lifestyle brand in HVAC, began investing more in hotel rooms last fall. The company sells electric heat pumps and operates on a B-to-B-to-C model; it sells directly to installers, who then sell the products to homeowners. But it can be difficult to let homeowners know about Quilt in the first place, or even get customers excited about a low-frequency purchase category like HVAC, said Lizz Niemeyer, vp of marketing and communications at Quilt. “It’s a category where there’s very little loyalty,” she told Modern Retail.
Niemeyer, who used to work in boutique hotels, figured Quilt could play a part in the industry. Last year, Quilt equipped rooms in two hotels — Madrona Hotel in California and Hotel Lilien in New York — with its heat pumps. Guests can learn more about the heat pumps via manuals in the rooms, and they can envision what the product would look like in their own home. “For an appliance, a lot of times, it’s hard to wrap your head around [that] … in a big-box store,” Niemeyer said.
The partnership is proving to be a valuable marketing opportunity. Since November, Quilt has sent home-design influencers and journalists to the hotels to learn about the heat pumps. This summer, it dispatched five creators to Hotel Lilien for an activation it called “Camp Cool.” The influencers made s’mores and went hiking, but they also made videos for their own channels and Quilt’s channels. “The hotels almost became our content studio,” Niemeyer said. “We’ve had about two and a half million impressions from the content.”
Quilt also uses the hotel rooms as loyalty tools for its HVAC installation partners. If someone sells the most Quilt systems in a given month, Quilt can send them on a weekend getaway to a partner hotel. All in all, hotels have “become this [tool], from awareness from articles to the actual advocacy [and] community building, to our latest big experiential activation,” Niemeyer said.
Lela Rose, an eponymous fashion label that launched in 1998, is also focusing on hospitality destinations as it expands its footprint. In addition to its pop-up at Caldera House, the brand held a July pop-up at Montage Big Sky in Montana, timed to a Professional Bull Riders event called Big Sky PBR. Guests could shop a curated assortment from Lela Rose Ranch, including rare vintage pieces sourced and hand-embroidered by Rose herself. Lela Rose also hosted a brand dinner at the resort.
Lela Rose’s stores and showrooms are meant to feel like lived-in spaces, so the brand is drawn to hotels and the idea of an “immersive vacation,” Rose told Modern Retail. When people travel, they want to be “part of that culture and landscape,” she explained. Rose, who lives most of the year in Jackson Hole, said she was excited to show off the region to visitors of the Wyoming pop-up. “We always pick places that we have some connection to,” she said.
Anderson, the brand’s COO, added that the brand tailors its pop-up merchandise to the location’s clientele. “[If] they’re going to the rodeo for the weekend, we’re curating product that tells and plays into that storyline,” she said. Hotels also pique the brand’s interest, Anderson said, because vacationers like to return home with mementos. “Whether or not they live in New York City and they’re going to wear a Western shirt every day, they like having that piece that they can take with them,” she said.
Importantly, working with hotels has allowed Lela Rose to introduce itself to a larger client base. The brand sells in department stores like Saks Fifth Avenue and has a handful of standalone locations throughout the U.S. “But we don’t have 20 stores in 20 different cities,” Anderson said. “[Hotels are] a really great way to get in front of new customers and engage with them.” In Big Sky, for example, 82% of the pop-up’s customers were new to the brand.
On the business-to-business front, Public Goods supplies refillable and reusable toiletries to hospitality partners including Mint House by Kasa, Stanly Ranch, Auberge Resorts Collection and Kimpton Hotel Enso. Like Lela Rose, the brand has seen a spike in new customers since entering the hospitality space, co-founder and COO Michael Ferchak told Modern Retail via email. “Year to date, 9.6% of new customers say they first discovered Public Goods through an Airbnb, with another 3.1% discovering us through a hotel or restaurant,” he said.
One of the reasons Ferchak thinks the products have resonated with guests is because hotels encourage people to try new things. “Rather than encountering a product through an ad or a single sample, guests can experience the quality, formulas and design firsthand over the course of a stay,” he said. “That’s particularly valuable for products like hand soap, shampoo, conditioner and body wash, which … remain among our best sellers today.”
Ferchak added that hospitality accounts for approximately 75% of the company’s B-to-B business. “We’ve seen the share of our business coming from short-term rentals and hotels increase year over year,” he said. “More recently, hospitality has become a much more intentional area of growth.”
As the summer travel season makes way for fall, more brands are seeing hotel partnerships as a priority. “Having worked in hotels, I think there’s just so much opportunity there,” Quilt’s Niemeyer said. “People are at their happiest when they’re going to hotels. You’re catching potential customers in some of the happiest moments of their year.”
What we’re reading
- On, looking to play a greater role in soccer, has lured Kylian Mbappé away from Nike. (CNN)
- Converse apologized for ad campaigns that drew comparisons to lynchings and KKK hoods. (Footwear News)
- Revolve is pairing up with Donatella Versace on a new fashion and beauty venture. (WWD)
What we’ve covered
- K-beauty brands such as Amuse, Voesh and Dr. Melaxin are making a splash at Target’s Beauty Studio.
- Beyond Yoga played up its new Glowzone fabrication at its NYC pop-up.
- Carter’s unveiled a brand refresh as it courts more Gen Z and millennial parents.