Ted Baker opened a flagship in Tokyo’s Omotesando last month aimed at reinforcing the brand’s London roots and providing shoppers with an immersive experience based on the British capital.
And central to achieving this in the two-floor store are a pair of digital installations created by UK design consultancy Imagination.
The first is in the well of the circular staircase that takes shoppers from the ground floor to the basement (far right). Here, 1950s analogue telephone exchange switchboards have been attached to the wall. These have glowing, LED-lit connection cables in red, white and purple, creating an illuminated spaghetti-like vista.
This would be impressive, but the interactive part is that if a shopper takes one of the cable ends and puts it into one of the empty sockets, sounds are generated, ranging from ambient street noise and sound bites, to music. The installation is intended to tempt shoppers down to the basement.
The store’s other digital showcase is a booth, fashioned to remind the onlooker of the back of a 1950s black cab. Sit in this and you cross an infrared beam that triggers a Cockney cabbie greeting while a video featuring footage of London scenes plays in the cab’s rear windscreen. Shoppers are encouraged to use their mobile devices to create films of themselves in the cab, tweeting their videos via #tedtaxi and @ted_bakerjapan.
When shoppers do get round to the business of looking at the offer, the two floors use interlinked hexagons as the overriding motif for the walls and for a series of mid-shop screens that are used to demarcate merchandise departments. This is a curious mix of 1950s kitsch and very modern technology and it makes another Ted Baker interior worth a look.
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