App, website, CRM, loyalty, parking, events and digital signage for Madrid’s first shopping centre.
Madrid in miniature.
A shopping centre is a small city. It has streets and traffic. It has neighbours who roll up their shutters every morning, festivities in December and someone who asks, always, where the toilets are.
La Vaguada also has a memory. It opened in 1983, was Madrid’s first shopping centre and was designed by César Manrique. It came after years of arguments with the neighbourhood of Barrio del Pilar. Perhaps that’s why it has never stopped feeling like one.
They asked us to bring their digital assets up to date. We ended up building something closer to a town hall.
The way in
Every day, more cars park here than most Spanish villages have residents. A city is judged by how you get into it.
The car park reads your number plate, charges the card saved in the app and gives you free hours depending on what you buy inside. You drive in, park, shop, leave. The barrier lifts and nobody has reached for their wallet.
The currency
Every city has its own currency. La Vaguada’s is hearts.
You pay by card in any shop and the hearts arrive on their own. No QR code, no points card, no need to tell anyone anything. If you pay in cash, you take a photo of the receipt. Then you swap the hearts for gifts in the shops themselves.
Like any currency, it has its counterfeiters. That’s what the limits, the alerts and a little patience are for.
The neighbours
The shops are the neighbours, and neighbours ask for things: to do building work, to film an advert, to go up on the roof.
These used to be PDFs sent back and forth by email. Now every request knows who it needs to reach. A few approvals later, nobody misses the PDFs.
Hover over a part, or tab to it, to see what it handles.Tap a part to see what it handles.
The census
A city that doesn’t know its residents can’t look after them.
Visitors, shops, staff and suppliers all live in the same CRM. From there, the centre segments, automates and lets people know: about an event, a promotion, the hearts they haven’t spent yet. Without pestering anyone.
The festivities
Cities are also measured by their festivities.
Tickets, capacity limits, access types, QR codes at the door. An elf called Noelín drew a crowd. No councillor for festivities could have done it better.
The signs
Website, app, digital directories, maps, information point, toilets. Everything says the same thing at the same time, because it all comes from the same place. And the question of where the toilets are has an answer on every screen.
The roads
No city lives in isolation. The system talks to payments (Redsys), to the car park (Skidata), to the cinema listings (Yelmo) and to promotions from brands such as Mastercard. And there’s always a new road on the map.
Hover over a system, or tab to it, to see what it does.Tap a system to see what it does.
A city is never finished. Nor is this one.
Every week there’s a sprint, a pothole to fix and a party to throw. We’re still around, the way good neighbours are.
