Fitch London toys with Lego interiors

Fitch London has created a retail concept for Lego, to be rolled out across UK, US and European markets this year, with the aim of making the iconic toy product ‘the world’s strongest brand among families with children’.

The work will be unveiled at Lego’s flagship store in Birmingham’s new shopping complex the Bullring on 4 September.

The Bullring store is the first example of what Fitch London design director Simon Threadkell calls a ‘quick and aggressive pilot programme’ that could see up to ten sites using the design in the US, ‘two or three’ in Germany and two more in the UK by the end of the year.

The group is ‘working on a concept for our future retail design’, says a Lego spokeswoman. ‘The Bullring store will be the basis for those designs, but [the look and feel] will be constantly evolving and changing.’

‘We see our Lego stores as part of our brand experience,’ the spokeswoman adds. ‘It’s a little bit more than a shop to us. It’s a place for consumers to interact with us and our play materials.’

The concept is about ‘unlocking a child’s creativity and talking directly to the child and the child within [us all],’ says Threadkell.

Specific designs include a ‘brand ribbon’ running round the perimeter of the store at the eye level of a six-year old, with products and interactive areas, waiting to be discovered by the child.

Elsewhere, a ‘living room’ made entirely of yellow Lego bricks – with a compressed 2.5m-high ceiling – creates an experiential space where consumers are ‘enveloped by the colour and space of the brand’, he adds.

Lego has three stores in the UK at present – in Milton Keynes, Kingston-on-Thames and Bluewater – but the design of these outlets is not thought to offer any pointers for the future.