We've been fairly critical of Palm Pre's marketing strategy, but here's one idea that works. As The Moment reports:

Looking for something that would embody the "timeless modern" quality of Palm's phone, the exhibition design firm Sparks came across photos of the itHouse that Koch had posted on Facebook, and hired Taalman Koch (who currently has four other itHouses in the works) to design the Palm Pre pavilion. For the pavilion, the architects employed their itHouse shed, an 8-by-12-foot enclosure that can be used for storage or as a temporary living space. The pavilion first popped up at The Americana at Brand, an outdoor shopping mall in Glendale, CA but moves this week to The Grove, in Los Angeles's mid-Wilshire neighborhood, where it will be installed through August 30th. Koch explained that the itHouse's system of pre-fab components was perfectly suited for the project, since the whole structure had to be dismantled, moved across town, and rebuilt in a day.

All of which makes a ton of sense--after all, the problem with pop-up stores is that they can be slapdash and forgettable; the problem with go-it-alone attempts to create a nicely branded store is how many compromises the design has to make, when budgets get tallied. Pre-fabs seem like a perfect solution.

We'll see how well these stores do--but here's to hoping that more wanna-be retailers adopt the strategy. We're looking at you, Microsoft.

[Via The Moment]