Fenwick use Absen LED to create mosaic masterpiece

CHALLENGE

Fenwick, leading department store with a reputation for distinctiveness, have opened a brand-new location in the recently built Lexicon shopping centre in Bracknell.

The area has recently gone through a full regeneration as part of the “Greening of Bracknell” to turn the town into the destination of choice for residents and visitors.

The brand-new Fenwick store brings all the kudos of the Fenwick brand, to Bracknell. Fenwick wanted to make sure this store could live up to its premium reputation and provide innovation and high-end interior design to reflect the brands on sale.

The interior designers working on the project, HMKM, enlisted the help from interaction design practice, Kin, to provide the latest AV technology.

INSIGHT

Kin have worked with both HMKM and Fenwick previously, supporting them with their Tunbridge Wells and Colchester locations, so were ideal to take on this new challenge.

HMKM kept the wider ‘green’ theme of the Lexicon, so designed a bespoke hanging trellis which climbed the three floors of the store, and included artificial plants interspersed throughout the structure.

Kin were looking for a screen that could be custom built to fit around the frame to work as an advertising platform for customer videos and Fenwick’s content, which included a forest setting to tie the whole theme together.

Having previously used the Absen N4 BLK, 4mm LED, at other Fenwick stores, HMKM knew that LED would be the best product again due to its a modular structure which can be scalable to any shape and size.

LED provides high brightness levels, even in high ambient light environments, which was perfect as the screens were being installed in an atrium in the centre of the store, where there is lots of natural light.

Customers would be able to view the displays as they travelled up and down the escalators right in front of the screens, meaning there would be minimal viewing distance. Because of this, Kin recommended to use a finer pixel pitch.

They got in touch with PSCo, specialist LED distributors, to look at what products would work best for the application.

WHAT WE DID

Kin had worked with PSCo on previous projects so knew that PSCo had a full portfolio of LED that could fit the brief. They bought Hugo Fenwick, Director, and his team into the PSCo Assessment Centre to view the Absen 2mm, 3mm and 4mm LED side by side, and to test content.

PSCo also set up a bespoke 5.5m x 7m, 3mm pixel pitch screen in their Research and Development area especially for the visit, so they could see the resolution the screens could achieve from different heights and angles to represent the screens being installed in store.

The final solution was the Absen N2 BLK, 2.4mm LED set up in 10 different canvases, ranging from 0.5m x 0.8m, 0.8m x 1.1m and 1.4m x 2.3m, formed from 70 panels. The Narrow Pixel Pitch (NPP) LED offered a viewing distance of less than 2 metres.

PSCo provided full technical support before and during the installation, including testing the panels in a portrait formation rather than the usual landscape layout to ensure that the product could match the space allowed for the screens on the trellis.

THE WIDER PROJECT

PSCo were able to utilise the wider Midwich group to source multiple large format displays which were used throughout the store. These included 49” screens in the car park and behind a two-way mirror in the luggage area, and bespoke interactive 37” totems to work as way-finder navigation screens.

A key part in this project were digital solutions provider, Intevi, who recently announced a distribution partnership with Midwich. They supplied a number of multiple output media players running their digital signage software which allowed the visual merchandising team to easily schedule and manage the content.

RESULT

Kevin Palmer, Director of Kin, commented on the project: “Fenwick strive to provide the perfect balance between prestige and value, and push for innovation. Both the interior design and AV technology needed to match up to the Fenwick brand, as well as fit in with the renovation of Bracknell. We wanted to make sure that the full solution we provided could bring a smart and up-to-date feel to the store. LED provides a flexible solution that is the perfect canvas for a bespoke and unique design that really helped bring the whole store together to produce stunning image quality and the perfect platform for high end brands to show off their content.”