How RNIB and The&Partnership Turned a Corner Shop Into a Case for Inclusive Design
RNIB's WhatsIn Store is a United Kingdom experiential and documentary campaign created by The&Partnership in 2021, staging a mock corner shop stocked with blank and vague packaging to reveal the daily confusion blind and partially sighted people face when shopping, and calling on brands to adopt inclusive design under the hashtag #DesignForEveryone.
The campaign ran from 19 to 23 August 2021 at 91 Hammersmith Grove, London W6. The activation took the form of a social experiment: a convincingly dressed corner shop, filled entirely with products bearing blank or deliberately uninformative packaging, invited members of the public inside while hidden cameras recorded their reactions. What those visitors experienced in minutes, blind and partially sighted consumers navigate every day. The footage became the backbone of a documentary-style film that RNIB urged its audience to share widely, amplifying the campaign's public interest reach beyond the physical installation itself.
The strategic proposition is direct: everyone has the right to know what they are buying. In the United Kingdom, where an estimated two million people live with sight loss according to Rnib Org Uk, the inability to read standard product packaging is not a minor inconvenience but a fundamental barrier to independence. WhatsIn Store sits within RNIB's broader Design for Everyone platform, a long-running effort to push accessibility from the margins of corporate responsibility into mainstream product and packaging strategy. By grounding the campaign in lived experience rather than abstract statistics, RNIB and The&Partnership transformed a public service message into an emotionally urgent call to action aimed at brand managers, designers, and consumers alike.
The WhatsIn Store campaign targets a gap between public sympathy and systemic change. Awareness of sight loss as a challenge is broadly established in the United Kingdom, yet the packaging and retail design industries have historically treated accessibility as optional rather than foundational. RNIB's strategy with The&Partnership was to close that gap by making the experience of inaccessible design viscerally real for sighted consumers and brand decision-makers who would ordinarily never encounter it.
The social experiment format is central to this logic. By recruiting ordinary members of the public into a controlled retail environment and recording their genuine confusion, the campaign generates evidence rather than assertion. This approach belongs to a tradition of documentary-style public interest advertising that uses observed human behaviour to build credibility, sidestepping the scepticism that can undermine traditional charity communications. The film format also allowed the campaign to travel far beyond the five-day physical activation, reaching audiences across social media who encountered it as shareable content rather than paid media.
In the United Kingdom's charity sector, RNIB operates in a competitive landscape for both public attention and voluntary income. Guide Dogs, one of the most prominent organisations serving the visually impaired community in the UK, reported income of £153 million for 2021 according to Oscr Org Uk, compared with RNIB's total gross income of approximately £86.49 million for the year ending March 2021 as reported by the Register-Of-Charities Charitycommission Gov Uk. Action on Hearing Loss represents a comparable peer in the disability charity space, competing for share of public generosity and corporate partnership. Against this backdrop, WhatsIn Store is less a fundraising tool than a positioning device: it argues that RNIB's mission extends beyond support services into the architecture of everyday commerce, giving the organisation a distinctive and actionable public identity.
The creative execution of WhatsIn Store rests on a single, precise idea: remove the information from packaging and the entire act of shopping becomes an exercise in anxiety. The Hammersmith Grove installation was built to look genuinely functional. Shelves were stocked, products were arranged in familiar retail configurations, and the shop's exterior gave no indication that what lay inside was a designed provocation rather than an ordinary convenience store. This commitment to surface authenticity is what made the hidden-camera footage credible.
The documentary genre was chosen deliberately. As reported by The Drum in coverage of the campaign's launch, the film captures visitors picking up products, turning them over, squinting at labels, and expressing audible frustration — responses that required no scripting precisely because the environment produced them naturally. The social experiment mechanic generates footage that functions simultaneously as evidence of a real problem, as emotional storytelling, and as shareable content designed to extend the campaign's reach organically through the #DesignForEveryone hashtag.
Production credits for the WhatsIn Store campaign are not fully publicly documented, though the campaign was produced under the creative direction of The&Partnership for RNIB. The agency had established its creative relationship with RNIB through the 2018 rebrand and See the Person, Not the Sight Loss campaign, which according to catsnake.com represented The&Partnership's first major project for the organisation and introduced the Seeing Differently brand platform. WhatsIn Store builds directly on that platform, translating its accessibility principles from identity design into experiential storytelling. The campaign comprised a single primary media asset — the documentary film — supported by social distribution and the physical activation itself, a deliberately lean creative package that concentrated impact rather than diffusing it across multiple executions.
No verified sales lift, donation uplift, or independently audited campaign-effectiveness metric for WhatsIn Store is publicly available. No award from Cannes Lions, the D&AD, the Clio Awards, the One Show, the Effie Awards, the Webby Awards, or WARC has been verified for this campaign. The Clapboard Score for WhatsIn Store is 71 out of 100, reflecting the campaign's strong conceptual clarity and experiential originality set against limited documented performance data.
What RNIB's own reporting does confirm is meaningful. According to rnib.org.uk, the WhatsIn Store pop-up shop generated wide-ranging interest and discussion across the food industry and social media. The campaign's documentary film recorded approximately 39,838 views and 1,183 likes, with 147 comments, figures drawn from platform data cited at the time of submission. These numbers are modest by viral standards but significant for a single-asset public interest film without a paid media budget at its core.
The structural case for the campaign's effectiveness is grounded in its design. By staging a social experiment in a real location, capturing genuine human responses, and distributing the results as shareable documentary content, WhatsIn Store created a self-reinforcing advocacy loop: the film is both the evidence of the problem and the mechanism for spreading awareness of the solution. In the United Kingdom's public interest advertising landscape, this kind of experiential-to-digital architecture represents a cost-efficient model for organisations operating with constrained voluntary income. RNIB's voluntary income reached £54.7 million in 2021/22 according to civilsociety.co.uk, a context in which campaign efficiency carries real organisational weight.
WhatsIn Store was an experiential public interest campaign by RNIB and The&Partnership, active in the United Kingdom in August 2021. A mock corner shop in Hammersmith, London, stocked with blank or uninformative packaging, used hidden cameras to document real shoppers' confusion, producing a documentary film distributed under the hashtag #DesignForEveryone.
The WhatsIn Store pop-up ran from 19 to 23 August 2021 at 91 Hammersmith Grove, London W6, in the United Kingdom. The five-day experiential activation served as the production environment for the documentary film that formed the campaign's single primary media asset, distributed across social media after the shop closed.
The&Partnership created the WhatsIn Store campaign for RNIB. The agency had worked with RNIB since 2018, when it led the organisation's rebrand and the See the Person, Not the Sight Loss campaign, which according to catsnake.com was The&Partnership's first major project for the charity and established the Seeing Differently brand platform.
No verified award from Cannes Lions, D&AD, the Clio Awards, the One Show, the Effie Awards, the Webby Awards, or WARC has been confirmed for WhatsIn Store. RNIB's 2021/22 annual report references an award in connection with a separate Metro Christmas fundraising collaboration, not this campaign, according to rnib.org.uk.
The WhatsIn Store documentary film recorded approximately 39,838 views, 1,183 likes, and 147 comments at the time of submission. According to rnib.org.uk, the pop-up generated wide-ranging interest and discussion across the food industry and social media. No independently audited performance metrics such as donation uplift or market-share change are publicly available for this campaign.
WhatsIn Store is part of RNIB's Design for Everyone platform, which calls on brands across the United Kingdom to make product packaging and design accessible to blind and partially sighted people. According to rnib.org.uk, approximately two million people in the UK live with sight loss, making accessible packaging a daily necessity rather than a niche accommodation.
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