Almost 150 years after it first opened, Macy’s is still finding ways to connect with shoppers of all ages, but its biggest challenge so far came in attracting Millennials to come inside the store rather than just pointing and clicking to get the clothes and goodies they wanted.
In its Herald Square location in New York City, Macy’s spent about four years focused on enhancing the shopper experience through interactivity and customization.
Premier Mounts and Reflect Systems helped the legendary retailer use digital experiences to connect with their myriad stores across the nation to expand their reach to the Millennials.
The successful merging of the physical and digital worlds has created what Macy’s officials call a “phygital” retail experience they hope will bring in new customers.
Creating a ‘Phygital’ Retail Experience
Macy’s new project dedicates 100,000 square feet of repurposed sales space to stage digital media environments designed to create newly immersive forms of customer experience. The majority of the basement floor was built to target the Millennials, who spend more than $65 billion at the store annually, and engage with them through a digital and social media strategy.
Included in the Herald Square renovation project was the creation of One Below, a new Millennial floor on the basement level of the flagship store.
The recently debuted floor is designed specifically around the desires of Millennial shoppers, catering to their lifestyles, shopping preferences and tech savvy to deliver the experiences they want from the brands they love, such as XOXO, Madonna’s Material Girl, Clinique and Jessica Simpson.
Macy’s expected the ability to shop for everything—clothing, handbags, cosmetics, accessories and shoes—in one place would deliver the convenience Millennials desire. They also knew they needed to tap into the tech-savvy Millennial consumer.
Macy’s Herald Square location underwent a four-year overhaul to attract more Millennial shoppers.
Premier Mounts and Reflect designed a “selfie” video wall and interactive social screens dedicated to its #MacysLove social media campaign. The selfie wall is inside The Logo Shop store-within-a-store, which offers a wide variety of upscale NYC-themed merchandise and allows shoppers the opportunity to take a selfie in front of several well-known New York City landmarks.
Guests use an interactive 32-inch Planar display mounted to the wall with Premier Mounts’ PFDM2 versatile flat mount to select an image to display across a large 3×3 video wall. The wall was created with 55” Samsung UD55D displays and Premier Mounts’ LMVS press & release pop-out ultra-slim mounts.
The guests can take a selfie and post it to their social media channels with the hashtag #MacysLove. These social media posts are aggregated and become dynamic content on the large Interactive Social Wall.
“This building is 115 years old,” said Chas Thornhill, senior systems engineer at Reflect. “We needed mounting solutions to address its thick existing structural walls, while still giving a flush display appearance that wouldn’t distract from the digital content.”
One of the most impressive interactive experiences found in retail is the immense, interactive social wall in One Below at Macy’s Herald Square. It’s the largest interactive video wall found in retail and it’s in the largest department store in the world.
The 15×4 interactive social wall is comprised of 60 tiles and measures 25 feet tall by 5 feet wide. The interactive social wall supports multi-touch, allowing as many as 10 to 12 users to interact at the same time. The social wall presents dynamic content in a self-refreshing display that features fashion trends, images and posts—including the hashtag #MacysLove, curated and pulled from social media feeds to in-store screens.
Premier Mounts and Reflect also installed three 65-inch touch-sensitive portrait displays in the foyer area of the fitting rooms. These interactive screens, housed in Premier Mounts’ LMVP press & release pop-put mounts with the INW-AM200 in-wall box for equipment storage, also display dynamic content from social media feeds with the hashtag #MacysLove.
In the Jockey Men’s department, a 10×1 video wall with 32-inch Samsung displays was added across the back wall. The goal was to use the video wall for branding and product promotion.
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Existing structural challenges were met again when the designated wall space was a tight pocket with zero space tolerance above or below the displays. This meant that each display would need to swing out from the wall for installation and service, and swing back to the seated position without crashing into the displays around it.
Premier Mounts’ engineering team designed a custom solution to address this concern, with a 2-day turnaround on design drawings to meet a tight deadline for this specific project.
“We created one single linear unit for the 10×1 video wall,” said Ross Divanfard, design manager at Premier Mounts. “Using a similar concept to our AM100 Swingout mount, we modified it so that all 10 mounts could swing out at once.”
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This allowed the installers to extend the video wall frame out about 15 inches for installation and alignment, then swing it back to the mounting surface, all as a single unit, said Divanfard.
In addition to all the interactive and experiential digital media at One Below, Macy’s installed seven 84-inch passive displays to deliver promotional and brand messaging. These screens provide information and entertainment content relevant to the Millennials while they shop.
Instead of the typical mall food court, Macy’s wanted digital menu boards in the food truck area of One Below. This experience allows Macy’s to display different content on each of the five screens or have one stream of content shown across all the screens.
Reflect integrated a 5×1 digital menu board using 48-inch Samsung DM48D displays and Premier Mounts’ P4263FP low-profile flat portrait mounts to create a digital menu board for the food truck area.
