As experiential marketing continually evolves, along with a rapidly changing retail environment, pop-up shops are becoming a crucial part of the space we interact and shop within. Lakeshore® Learning Materials took this to their best interest and came to STAR to create an engaging fixture in the Mall of America®. This stand-alone retail structure would focus on the chain’s Gifts for Growing Minds store, featuring STEM-focused toys aimed to kids up to the age of 11 that encourage designing, coding, and building.
Lakeshore Learning Materials is a California-based maker of educational toys with 60 stores in the United States, two of those in Minnesota. In order to push their valued market of teachers and schools and expand into the parent market, a pop-up vision was ideal.
The project had tight timing and budgets to consider, but the Lakeshore Learning team wanted to utilize Mall of America’s high traffic (particularly during Labor Day weekend as a debut) to showcase their products in a unique and impactful way. Targeted towards parents, the 200-square-foot pop-up features easily accessibly product displays and free activity stations for kids to interact. STAR worked tirelessly and furiously to fabricate a large octonorm fixture (complete with a chimney!), play tables, POS counter, and an interactive tree (fully equipped with a magnetic laminate that the client’s magnetic gears can stick to). STAR’s knowledge from past projects assisted in a timely approval regarding strict union rules and the need for the project to be approved by the city of Bloomington. In order to morph Lakeshore Learning’s design vision into reality, STAR’s engineering department played a vital role the process to make the pop-up come to life as well.
If you have some early holiday shopping to do, be sure to check out their pop-up on the third floor of Mall of America’s south side near Rain Forest Café and Crayola. The store will be active until the end of December 2019, and until the end of the year, a Gifts for Growing Minds purchase will include a $1 donation from Lakeshore to DonorsChoose.org, a nonprofit funding supplies for in-need classrooms.
