One of the great ironies in retail today is that the brands that have invested the most in building desire and emotional connection are often the same ones whose products end up locked away in ugly, poorly designed security cabinets.

Across many retail formats, there is a clear and growing need to merge attractive, secure merchandise displays with compelling, point-of-sale digital branding. Yet it is frankly shocking how poorly this has been handled to date.

For several years, I have been thinking about a different approach, combining LED display surfaces with round, cylindrical glass or acrylic vitrines. Manual or automated cylindrical doors could discreetly slide out of the way without forcing shoppers to step back or aside, preserving intimacy and flow at the shelf.

Modern microLED displays make this feasible. They are vibrant, ultra-thin, tileable, and capable of LCD-level pixel density in fully modular formats. They can be configured in virtually any geometry, with mounting points and display hardware integrated within the display surface itself.

Layer onto that the full potential of retail media networks, and the case becomes hard to ignore. No pun intended.