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With larger-than-life, colorful, fun iconic characters, the M&M's Brand® needed retail theater on a grand scale for its international flagship store. Fitting the bill is a 25,000-sq.-ft. "fishbowl" space in Times Square with dramatic color-changing lighting effects, the world's largest wall of chocolate, an interactive color mood analyzer, enormous M&M's® characters, attention-getting "hero" columns, a NASCAR car, and fixtures and merchandising featuring the ubiquitous round shape and an array of vivid merchandise.

Culminating nearly a decade of experimentation in retail formats, the New York store takes the brand to the next level in retail. Mars Retail Group had learned the importance of design from its inaugural store, a four-story site on the Vegas strip. The retailer enlisted Columbus-Ohio based design firm Chute Gerdeman to translate the M&M's Brand® into a mall site for its second retail foray, in Orlando. For M&M's World® New York, opened Dec. 7, 2006, Chute Gerdeman pumped up the color, shape, and scale for the high-profile store to serve as an international destination for the brand.

Visual Prominence
With 270 degrees of glass walls, the store showcases its interior to the world at the corner of Broadway and West 48th Street—coincidentally across the street from a Hershey's store. Bringing the M&M's Brand® outside visually are not only the merchandise and fixturing seen through the vast windows, but also two perimeter structural columns featuring vertical video billboards. "To compete with the intense color already visible on Times Square, our challenge was to make this space glow. The technology we implemented makes the store about 40 percent brighter than anything else in the area and includes two enormous video billboards featuring a kaleidoscope of M&M's® in color," explains Denny Gerdeman, principal of Chute Gerdeman.

Conversely, bringing the outside in is the view of Times Square from the mezzanine level, which was added by Chute Gerdeman; the vantage point draws people into the store just for a look. The two other floors constitute a feel-good shopping experience that entices many of them to tarry.

Pulsing with excitement, the store features LED lighting effects that can be changed for holidays or promotions. As with the Orlando store, a color mood analyzer—with column wrap, tubes, and overhead piece made by Universal Custom Display—tells visitors what M&M's® color best suits their current mood, but this one has the added ability to project a customer's image onto giant real-time video screens.

International Flavor
Also made by Universal Display, the My M&M® Wall of bulk dispensers of the chocolate candies sorted to allow customers to select their own colors spans two stories, and 72 of the 144 tubes are two levels high. In a nod to the international nature of Manhattan, the wall features bubble displayers showing the colors of various countries. "Since M&M's® is about color and New York is a metaphor for the world, we wanted this to be all about, 'The world is a bag of M&M's®,'" said Brian Shafley, president and creative director of Chute Gerdeman.

With perimeter wall space limited due to the surrounding glass, the 22 interior building columns function like perimeter fixturing, with wraparound slatwall custom-made to spec by Showall Inc. and Total Display Systems (TDS). Topping the columns are funnels made of white fabric by Moss Inc. With a 12-ft. diameter at the top, the color-changing backlit funnels sport the M&M logo.

The beloved M&M's® characters have taken on New York-inspired personas in giant fiberglass and foam sculptures made by Symmetry throughout the store. Blue rotates in a John Travolta-style pose on a disco floor that lights up. Making a 17-ft.-tall statement as Lady Liberty beckoning visitors up the escalator is the sole female character, Green©, famous for her autobiography, "I Melt for No One." Yellow© sits at a children's activity table, while Red is perched on a window washer platform.

Brand Reinforcement
Thanks to a constantly evolving line of merchandise, the store's freestanding fixtures are all mobile. Round shapes serving as a constant reminder of the M&M's Brand® include such fixture elements as freestanding bubble bins, wall-mounted bubble vitrines, yellow stools in the children's activity area, and floating bubble and bowl merchandisers on the columns—all provided by Seven Continents Corp.—as well as such visual merchandising elements as clear orbs (sitting on the cashwrap and tables) made by Storeworks. And the fixture customization carries through to curved hangbars and curved hardware by Capitol Hardware.

"The entire retail experience is an orchestrated expression in color," says Gerdeman. "This is an experiential destination for guests to indulge in a world of chocolate and collectible treats, a place where chocolate really is better in color."