Big LED Walls, Giant LCDs Part Of New H&M Flagship In Kuwaiti Mall That Already Had 5 H&Ms
October 4, 2018 by Dave Haynes
Many things seem to be way over the top, so to speak, when done on the Arab side of the Persian Gulf.
Consider news that the Swedish fast-fashion retailer H&M opened on Sept. 12th its largest store on the planet in a Kuwait mall that already had five H&M stores.
The Kuwaiti flagship store is in the Avenues mall, the biggest in that country. It looks very little like an H&M out in the suburbs of Canada or the U.S., with a marble facade, feature staircase and a whole bunch of not-quite-fine pitch LED displays, not to mention giant NEC LCDs.
Kuwait-based DeLite Engineering was the retailer’s prime contractor for this project and UAE-based 2.0 Concepts ( a related company) was the AV/visualization consultant.
The software driving the screens is Stratacache (and not more retail-oriented Scala), and the LEDs are from a company with the ill-considered name LAMP – ill-considered because looking up LAMP and LED returns endless results for low-cost Chinese lights and fixtures. I don’t have enough years left to keep scrolling, looking for LAMP.
2.0 did an indoor drone tour that shows where all the digital signage went in. Impressive stuff, and a reminder that if the store is designed with digital in mind, you can do things like put in 3.9mm at waaaaay less cost than 1.5mm, and because it is set back and not right in shopper faces, it will still look good.
Still wrapping my head around a mall being so big it can have five or six of the same store, when it’s not a Starbucks (mall has nne of those). I was going to count and verify that H&M tally, but the mall has a breathtakingly crappy website that won’t even load properly (tried three different browsers). Sheesh.
LAMP is part of the Unilumin Group. I will be in Toronto/Ottawa/Montreal the week of Oct 22nd and would love to connect. – Mark Roberts, Unilumin Strategic Accounts. Ps… great work and industry news.