Sports are moving off the fields: why brands are now investing in cultural venues
From June 25 to 27, 2026, ASICS and Little Tokyo Table Tennis invested our gallery in 10 Turenne Street, in the Marais district, to transform the venue into a genuine pop-up ping-pong club. Organized during Paris Fashion Week, this event, open to the public, offered training sessions with coaches, a tournament, exhibition matches, live podcasts, DJ sets, and the presentation of an exclusive collaboration between the two brands.
Through this event, ASICS illustrates a new way of designing brand activations. The venue hosts both sporting activities and cultural programming, creating an experience that goes beyond a simple collaboration launch.
Sport as a cultural experience
For a long time, sporting events were conceived around performance or competition. Now, they are part of a much broader logic where fashion, design, music, gastronomy, and content creation are intertwined.
The choice to organize this pop-up during Fashion Week is anything but accidental. The boundaries between worlds are gradually fading, and brands are now seeking to address a community rather than a simple target consumer group. Sport is becoming a common language, a pretext for meeting, sharing, and experiencing.
In this context, an event is no longer just a product demonstration. It offers an experience to be lived, a desire to participate, to exchange, and to return.
Places that can change their identity
To respond to these new formats, event spaces must also evolve. An art gallery can become a free drop-in ping-pong club for a few days without losing its identity. On the contrary, it is this capacity for transformation that makes a venue valuable today.
To 10 Turenne Street visitors could also attend a podcast, play a few rounds at a table, follow a supervised training session, or simply enjoy the atmosphere created by DJ sets and various activities. The venue has become a living space rather than just a backdrop.
This modularity allows brands to imagine hybrid concepts where each space serves a different purpose throughout the day.
The place, an element in its own right of the experience
The success of an activation today relies as much on its content as on the location that hosts it. A well-situated, easily identifiable space that can adapt to different scenarios becomes a true communication tool.
By transforming a gallery in Le Marais into a pop-up ping-pong club, ASICS and Little Tokyo Table Tennis demonstrated that a space can tell a story, extend a brand's universe, and offer a consistent experience to every visitor.
At Perfect Place Project, we observe this evolution through the projects we support. Brands are looking for spaces capable of hosting increasingly creative concepts where commerce, culture, sport, and events meet naturally. Spaces like our gallery at 10 Rue de Turenne are designed to support this new generation of activations by giving each project the freedom to fully make the space their own.