This project was one of the more demanding briefs I’ve taken on, a fully immersive retail installation for Pop Mart’s Skullpanda: You Found Me series at 430 7th Ave, Manhattan, running from October 2025 through January 2026.
I came on as the lead 3D experience designer, working remotely from Karachi alongside an LA-based agency and Pop Mart’s creative team in China. My scope covered the full design journey: concept development, spatial layout, lighting and material direction, cloth simulation for the draping system, and construction-ready renders handed directly to the build team in New York.
- Role: 3D Experience Design, Graphic Visualization, Environment Design
- Tools: 3ds Max, Photoshop
- Timeline: October 2025 – January 2026
- Location: Remote (Karachi) → Client (Los Angeles) → Site (New York City)
The Brief: Designing an Immersive Retail World for Skullpanda
Pop Mart’s Skullpanda line occupies a specific emotional register — dark, poetic, slightly otherworldly. The You Found Me series needed a physical environment that matched that feeling and turned a standard retail footprint into a place people wanted to stay in, explore, and photograph.
Location, Timeline, and Scope
430 7th Ave is a busy Manhattan address with no tolerance for a half-finished installation. The pop-up had to hold up through peak retail season, accommodate high visitor volumes, and remain visually sharp from opening day through January. The physical build team needed renders precise enough to work from without back-and-forth clarification — that level of render fidelity was a hard requirement, not a preference.
The Creative Challenge
The original brief was a classical Old Theater aesthetic. Mid-project, the creative direction shifted to a modernized flat-draping concept — a significant change in geometry, material logic, and spatial mood. I re-ran the cloth simulations and rebuilt the core geometry within the same sprint, and the construction timeline held.
Experience Design Concept: Three Worlds, One Red Thread
The space is anchored by a continuous monochromatic red draping system. It doesn’t divide the zones — it connects them. Visitors move through three separate environments, each designed around a specific Skullpanda character, while the red draping keeps the overall pop-up experience design coherent.
The Hero Vignettes
- Darkness: Mirrors and starry lighting create an infinite void. The space reads as cosmic and disorienting in the best sense.
- Pranky Peanut: A dense, organic environment packed with 3D-modeled peanut shells. Very textural, very different from the other two zones.
- Chomp: A retro-futuristic diner with neon accents and controlled mood lighting. It’s the most grounded of the three vignettes but still clearly within the Skullpanda world.
Each zone works on its own. Together they give the installation real range.
The “You Found Me” Diorama Wall
This was the centrepiece, a custom feature wall with six dioramas, one per collectible figure. Visitors peer into small openings and find a miniature scene built specifically for that character. It’s the part of the installation that consistently got people to slow down and stay. It also became the most photographed spot in the pop-up.
3D Design Process: From Concept to Construction-Ready Renders
The Mid-Project Pivot and Rapid Iteration
Rebuilding around the draping concept meant re-approaching the geometry from the ground up. The cloth simulations had to match the specific sheen and drape behaviour of the red textile already sourced for the physical build in NYC — contractors can’t adjust for a render that describes a different material. That material-matching work took several iterations and was worth every one of them.
Global Collaboration Across Three Time Zones
Karachi to LA to China is a coordination problem that kills momentum on a lot of projects. The way we handled it: I shifted my working hours to overlap with the LA team’s schedule, which made real-time redlining sessions possible. Lighting revisions, layout adjustments, diorama wall mechanics — those got resolved overnight rather than sitting in an email chain for two days.
Texture Fidelity and Material Matching
The Skullpanda dolls have specific fur characteristics that matter. Getting the density and softness right in render required multiple passes. Same with the drape fabric — the sheen in the final renders needed to correspond exactly to the physical textile so the build team had a real reference, not an approximation.
Deliverables
- Full 3D environment models (3ds Max)
- Construction-ready visualization renders
- Lighting and material specification renders
- Cloth simulation outputs for the draping system
- Diorama wall design and layout documentation
What This Project Proves About Remote Experience Design
The Pop Mart project ran across three countries, absorbed a full creative pivot, and delivered construction-ready renders on schedule. The pop-up opened on time and ran through January without issue.
If you’re putting together a retail activation, a pop-up installation, or an immersive brand experience and need a 3D experience designer who can work remotely and hand off render-accurate documentation to an on-site build team, get in touch.
