Sport Chek and Pro Hockey Life: Designing engaging flagship stores

When developing new flagship stores for their Sport Chek and Pro Hockey Life (PHL) brands, FGL Sports, a division of Canadian Tire Corporation, engaged Kasian to redefine the retail experience and tell a compelling athletic story that inspires and engages customers.

The new design concepts reimagined store layout, look, and feel by decluttering spaces, adding focal points, and improving flow for a more intuitive customer journey. Sport Chek’s flagship stores were designed to appeal broadly to athletes, while Pro Hockey Life focused on hockey enthusiasts with a distinct arena-inspired concept. Select elements from previous stores were updated and reconfigured, ensuring brand continuity.

Every aspect of the retail experience was considered from branding, merchandising layout, fixturing, specialty elements, to support spaces. Store movement, racking height, and traffic flow were analyzed alongside competition and target audience metrics to better align features with customer needs.

Key design drivers included curb recognition, intuitive wayfinding, interactivity, and a sense of sports authority and achievement. Light was used to highlight destinations, guide circulation, and create focal points. Interactive digital and hologram kiosks, memorabilia displays, and durable product testing areas brought energy and storytelling into the shopping experience. PHL stores, shaped like hockey arenas, incorporated the sights, sounds, and energy of the game, with circulation paths designed as a narrative of the sport.

Flexibility and modularity allow both brands to adapt to seasonal changes, update branding, and refresh merchandising. From showpiece displays to engaging checkout experiences, the designs deliver a clean, organized, and interactive retail environment.

“Great retail needs to be filled with experiences and emotion. Shoppers can’t be bored, the convergence of leisure, entertainment and retail drives our design thinking. Customers need to feel like the experience has been created for them.” – Michael McDonald, Principal