There’s a Line Around Block for Themed Retailing

John Wright would like to make all the world a stage and you the star.

Wright is CEO of Lexington Scenery & Props of Sun Valley, and he took over this month as president of the Burbank-based Themed Entertainment Assn., a 600-member trade group of designers and fabricators who help build theme parks as well as make shopping malls, restaurants and stores look more like theme parks.

“What we do is create an environment for people to experience something special” beyond a routine shopping excursion, said Wright, a former stage actor who finds himself at the nexus of a sea change in merchandising.

Themed retailing has been around even before those juice stands with the giant oranges on top dotted the landscape earlier this century. But the concept took another leap forward last month with the opening of the Southland’s newest mall, the Block, in the city of Orange.

The Block is a $165-million, 811,000-square-foot fantasy land of shops, restaurants, bars, movie theaters and a mega-video arcade in what feels decidedly like a sound stage environment.

The developer, Arlington, Va.-based Mills Corp., claims the mall is ablaze with more electric lights than anyplace west of Las Vegas.

Even the pedestrian benches are theatrical, most of them being in a lighted bougainvillea-trellis motif, except for the ones in front of the 30-screen Cineplex, which resemble 3-foot-wide snippets of 35 mm film stock, sprockets and all.

The benches were part of a $2.3-million package created by a former defense contractor, Penwal Industries of Rancho Cucamonga.

For many years Penwal made exact-replica models of bombs and missiles for military training. But when aerospace contracts dried up in the 1980s, the firm segued into themed decor and began filling orders for such products as human-scale Looney Tunes characters by the hundreds for the worldwide chain of Warner Bros. retail stores.

The firm’s president, Chris Pennington, pointed out the Block’s Penwal-designed automated teller machines, encased in sleek steel tubes resembling torpedoes. “Everybody wants that heavy, shiny-metal industrial look,” he said.

Penwal’s annual sales of $25 million are mostly to customers in the themed retail and entertainment industry. It’s a good client base to cultivate, says Harrison Price, a San Pedro-based entertainment center analyst. The segment is growing so fast that no precise estimates exist for its value.

“It’s in a state of active evolution,” Price said.

Wright said he is compiling sales data from Themed Entertainment Assn. members to determine the size of the market they control.

Theme parks and related attractions alone represent at least a $7.5-billion-a-year industry. But themed entertainment also includes venues such as Rainforest Cafe, where Ontario Mills diners are surrounded by animatronic animals and thunderstorms, or Dave & Busters at the Block, where customers can eat and then climb onto virtual-reality rides. (Some themed restaurant groups, like Planet Hollywood, have been having trouble, however, and it’s become clear that themed entertainment by itself is not enough.)

The themed entertainment movement was spawned by the movie industry, and Southern California is the world’s hub for design and production of themed entertainment. A visit to Lexington’s warehouse-sized workshop near the Burbank Airport shows why.

One recent afternoon, Wright, the sturdy redheaded son of Irish and Scottish immigrant parents, watched as some of his workers were building a replica of the main staircase of the Titanic as part of a touring exhibition of some of the movie’s props and costumes.

A few steps away, other workers were building a set for a TV commercial with a living room and gymnasium. Still others were painting giant Lego toys to be shipped to Carlsbad for next spring’s opening of Legoland California, a $130-million family theme park.

Lexington had designed and built settings for attractions at Universal Studios Hollywood, including King Kong’s New York skyline and Jurassic Park’s jungle, before Mills Corp. hired the firm to fabricate Golden State iconography at its 2-year-old Ontario Mills factory-outlet mall.

Lexington responded by creating an indoor garden with animatronic flowers that blossom when an enormous watering-can sails overhead at the 1.7-million-square-foot mall.

Infusing projects with a theatrical dash comes easily to Wright, who as an actor was one of the founders of Hollywood’s Matrix Theater, a legitimate stage company. But he found his true calling when he sold his first load of stage scenery to an art designer working on a rock music video.

He later joined with partner Frank Bencivengo, a commercial design architect, and they established Lexington, at first to build sets for independent TV productions.

Now they derive 30% of their $15 million in annual sales from that activity, but they have branched into theme park operations (50% of sales) and supplying trade shows and retail-entertainment venues (20% of sales). Overall, Lexington sales are up 15% over last fiscal year.

Wright said indicators point to continued strong growth. Aside from the $2-million Legoland project--involving work such as fashioning an Egyptian tomb setting for a mummy made of Lego plastic building blocks--Lexington is also at work on a shipwreck attraction at San Diego’s Sea World and booking a growing business in museum and science installations.

“Microbes: Invisible Invaders, Amazing Allies” was designed by Lexington for about $500,000 as a touring exhibit that spent last summer in the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History. Wright said his firm has similar projects underway in Ohio and Maryland. Wright anticipates sales of more projects to museum directors who are expressing interest in educating their patrons by entertaining them.

Of course the same strategy--getting shoppers to linger and spend more by entertaining them--is driving themed retailing, said Jill Bensley, president of JB Research Co. of Ojai.

There is still a strong tradition in “have-to” merchandising that favors fair pricing and fast, easy access for segments such as food markets, Bensley said.

“But the people who are smart enough to turn ‘have-to’ retailing into ‘want-to’ retailing are really kicking butt,” she added, citing the El Segundo-based New Bristol Farms Inc. chain of upscale food stores as an example. Bristol Farms sells what amounts to kitchen staples for higher prices by using themed decor to create a unique identity brand and an entertaining atmosphere.

The interior of the chain’s Mission Viejo store, for instance, has adobe-like undulating plaster walls, oversize pillars, stone cornices and tile eaves over the deli counter--a “Zorro”-like setting that ties thematically with the nearby Mission San Juan Capistrano. The store was designed and fabricated by Lexington Scenery.

It’s a good investment, said Debi English, New Bristol Farm’s vice president of store design, who hired Lexington.

“All I know is that image matters, and customers sense the difference,” she said.

She has hired other firms over the years but said that Lexington has one advantage over its competitors--no doubt related to its show-business origins.

“They know how to work with art directors,” she said. “Temperamental and picky and sometimes vague art directors.”