Sarah H. Rogers
Cricket Wireless
Flexible Store System
12+ years on the Cricket Wireless account · Experiential retail design
THE CHALLENGE
Cricket needed to show up in four completely different environments — a middle school gym, an outdoor state fair, a franchisee sales conference, and a corporate leadership meeting — and land the right message in every one. Building a custom experience for each was never going to scale. The brand needed a system, not four separate projects.
THE WORK
A brand system, not a single kit — a toolkit built so Cricket shows up looking and feeling like an authentic extension of the store no matter the room, then gets tailored to whoever's actually standing in front of it.
State Fair of Texas
Same core kit and technology used at every state fair, rebuilt for an outdoor, all-weather footprint — fully enclosed and wrapped on the exterior so Cricket held its own against T-Mobile pink and Verizon red. The audience here is mixed, many hearing of Cricket for the first time — this is the intercept moment. Digital screens go deep on what Cricket offers, and every phone runs our proprietary Cricket Explorer+ tool so shoppers can check device details, rate plans, and coverage on the spot. A fair-exclusive promotion runs at every activation — without one, most people just walk past.
Junior Achievement of Georgia
JA Georgia now holds this up as the best-in-class example they show new businesses entering the space
The existing space hadn't been touched in three years. The audience is 6th and 8th graders, so the job wasn't "explain wireless" — it was make wireless fun while showing kids how central it already is to their daily lives. JA's Discovery Centers touch nearly half of all middle schoolers in Georgia, across 13 schools — 62,033 students, 7,352 volunteers, and 3,141 teachers every year, all getting exposure to Cricket as a local Atlanta business. That's future customers, parents those kids influence, and future employees, all in one room. The students get genuinely excited to walk in — not a compliment that age hands out for free — and post-visit feedback consistently highlights the same two things: how much people learned, and how approachable the staff felt.
Prepaid Wireless Expo
A different job entirely — this booth is the biggest sales tool we have for people who might open a Cricket store. Screens shift to stats and customer data, and Cricket Explorer+ now demonstrates the tools we equip stores with to sell. A private area with a dedicated touchscreen walks serious prospects through store format and design options. We generate hundreds of new leads a year off this floor, each one reviewed for fit before becoming an Authorized Retailer.
Authorized Retailer Conference
Cricket's once-a-year gathering of every store owner and corporate leadership. This one isn't a data play — it's a rally: getting every retailer in the room excited about where Cricket is headed, trained on new programs, and fired up about what's launching next. Success here isn't a number — it's what's on people's faces.
That kit-building approach proved durable: the same modular thinking has since grown into a full family of event configurations — different footprints and layouts for different spaces — used across both consumer fairs and B2B trade events, not just the four stops above.
THE RESULTS
JA Georgia is the one activation here with a documented track record — see above. The Texas State Fair and Authorized Retailer Conference don't have formal performance data attached to them; their value shows up in attendance and how the room responds, not in a number I can point to here.