Location: Charlotte
Vendor: SME
Client: Legends Global
Cost: N/A
The issue: How to expand a sports property’s retail footprint with a more substantial but equally flexible structure.
Gist of the structure: The 2025 PGA Championship’s main merchandise structure at Quail Hollow Club was nearly 50,000 square feet, large enough that a handful of display cars from tournament sponsors were parked throughout the store.
But SME’s 50-by-50-foot trailer-based structure helped expand the tournament’s footprint into uptown Charlotte — about 10 miles from Quail Hollow — with a climate-controlled pop-up retail setting that felt more substantial and inviting than a windowless tent and took less than two days to set up. Large glass facades increased visibility and invited customer traffic, and back-of-house storage, integrated merchandise walls and centralized checkout streamlined Legends Global’s retail operation.
Based in Winston-Salem, N.C., SME features a variety of funky assets on its website, ranging from Airstream campers to vans, to multilevel structures, many of which are deployed as sports marketing tools.
Noteworthy: SME is providing one of these stores to Indiana University this fall, as the Hoosiers look to capitalize on merchandise demand stemming from their unexpected 2025 college football national championship.
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