Turning a shopping centre
into a game board.
Merry Hill is one of the UK’s biggest shopping centres: 1.6 million sq ft and 250+ stores. But for a lot of people in the West Midlands, it had started to feel a bit dated. The 2025 brief from Savills: bring back shoppers who hadn’t visited in a year or more, and make the centre feel fresh again.
I’d joined Kit & Caboodle as an intern while finishing my degree, and was kept on full-time with a raise. This became one of the biggest projects I led. Working with our engineers, I defined and designed the whole platform: QR routing across 120+ placements, AR games, reward logic, dashboards and data capture. It was described as the UK’s largest QR code activation at the time.
We weren’t putting a game in the mall. The mall was the game.
73 vinyls · 4 colour routes · 3 AR games · 47 retailers · 4,000+ prizes
The client knew exactly who they wanted back, so we built one game with a different hook for each of them.
A free day out the kids can lead and the parents still value.
People who skip shopping-centre events, unless it’s worth filming.
Here for a reward that’s genuinely worth the walk.
Merry Hill’s marketing and centre teams saw daily scans, the busiest QR sites, prize burn-down and postcode spread at a glance, with player data synced to Dotdigital for follow-up comms.
Every decision came back to one question: what would stop someone from scanning? Four calls removed those reasons.
Nobody downloads an app to scan a code on a whim. So one web app handled everything, onboarding, points, prizes and three AR games, and it fell back gracefully when the signal dipped mid-mall.
Every day, 84 prizes hid behind random codes as Beat Drops: first scan wins. Every other scan earned Pulse Points towards a £3,500+ grand prize draw. Simple enough to explain in one breath.
We asked for an age range and a home postcode at sign-up. It cost players a few seconds, and gave the client 5,200 tagged profiles showing exactly who came, and from where.
Halfway through, players worked out they could refresh a game to farm points. Clever, but not fair. We capped rewards per scan so the leaderboard stayed honest and the prizes didn’t drain.
One game, two layers. On the phone: onboarding, Pulse Points, Beat Drops, a leaderboard and three AR games. In the centre: 73 illustrated vinyls on four colour routes, and a 360° hero set built for AR.
Scroll sideways for 8 key screens →
From the client debrief, 18 July – 31 August 2025: 336,859 scans, 234,691 successful interactions, 5,200 registered players and 9,175 prizes won across 47 retailers.
Parents aged 35–44 were our biggest group, and 58% of their wins were followed through. Players aged 45–54 scanned less but converted best, at 63%, while 18–24s scanned the most and followed through on 44%. The platform stayed stable through peak use, and the data it captured now feeds the client’s future planning, so a six-week activation became an ongoing insight tool.
Floor vinyls in the busiest zones were wearing by week three. Testing them under real foot traffic first would have saved mid-run replacements.
Young adults wanted trend-led brands and rewards inside the game. Under-18s needed a parent-friendly way to redeem.
