A vibrant, one-of-a-kind festive display for Galerias Tlaxcala

This is part of our series of “festive season inspiration”. Today, we’ll be taking a look at how a local shopping center in Mexico used a custom-designed festive and decorative lighting display to attract visitors, enhance mood and increase the length of visits over the holiday season.

The Story

Galerias Tlaxcala is a shopping center based in one of the smallest towns in Mexico and in 2017, it was newly developed by Mexican department store company, El Puerto de Liverpool SAB de CV (Liverpool). Liverpool already knew that they wanted their newest shopping center to look spectacular over the holiday season, but they weren’t completely sure of what they wanted to see. Their single requirement for festive decorative lighting for Galerias Tlaxcala was this:

“It needs to be better than our competitors.”

The MK Illumination team in Mexico has a long-standing relationship with Liverpool and they combined their knowledge of Liverpool’s expectations over the years with their understanding of the local culture and their international insights and they started playing with ideas.

From speaking to Liverpool and visiting the shopping center, they knew that any lighting concept needed to be creative and colorful to tease the imaginations of visitors and create a high-impact visual impact that visitors would want to share online and offline.

They proposed a combination of festive lighting and decoration that was playful, fun and rather tasty: oversized hard Christmas candy, striped in red, green and white, would hang from the ceilings and be piled up into contemporary Christmas trees draped with light to create a festive atmosphere. Oversized gingerbread men and women popped up alongside the candy and featured in a Santa’s grotto, perfect for photo opportunities. It was a one-of-a-kind proposal, and Liverpool was immediately drawn to it.

MK Illumination was awarded the project and set to work bringing their ideas to life.

“The hard candy was a real challenge: each item had to be hand-painted because we wanted to create the illusion of real-life candy in giant form. The end result was stunning and well worth the hours of painstaking work!” – José Alberto Vargas, Director MK Illumination Mexico, and Latin America.

In October 2017, the installation began and the grand switch-on took place in early November, much to the delight of the customer and shopping center visitors, who stared in wonder at the festive decoration and lighting, took and shared selfies and enjoyed meeting Santa and sitting in his chair in the photo point.

Liverpool loved the result, and we were told that the Sweet Treats concept was one of their favorite festive lighting and decorative scenes in 2017 – quite a compliment, as they owned 25 shopping centers at the time!

Fill your shopping center with custom-designed festive lighting and decor

If you’re interested in talking about how festive decorative lighting can fill your shopping center with a festive atmosphere that attracts visitors, get in touch. We love to chat.