The format, tested in one of the country's busiest malls
MR D.I.Y Plus · MyTown Shopping Centre, Kuala Lumpur
Where the vocabulary was worked out
Every format has a store where the language stops being a proposal and starts being a standard.
MyTown is a high-traffic urban centre with a demanding schedule and a large, family-heavy catchment — which makes it an unforgiving place to test ideas and an extremely useful one. The arch geometry, the ring ceiling, the pavilion approach to sub-brand zones and the chevron ceiling rhythm all got resolved here under real programme pressure.
Working at pace changes what survives. Details that need a specialist trade or a long lead time get replaced by details that a good general contractor can build from a typical drawing. What is left is a vocabulary that is genuinely repeatable — which is exactly what a rollout format needs to be.
Pavilions, not departments
A sub-brand needs a threshold, or it is just a run of shelves with a different sign above it.
The Always Fun zone is treated as a pavilion — a defined structure you enter rather than a stretch of aisle you pass. That distinction sounds academic until you watch how differently people behave: at a threshold they slow down, look up, and commit to the zone. Along an aisle they keep walking.
The pavilion approach also makes the format modular. A sub-brand can be added, resized or dropped between stores without redrawing the whole plan, because it is a discrete object placed on the floor rather than a section of the floor's structure.
Designing for the group, not the shopper
In a family catchment, the person holding the basket is rarely the person deciding how long you stay.
A family arriving together splits almost immediately — one adult heads for the errand, a child heads for whatever is brightest, a second adult follows the child. The store's dwell time is then set by the slowest member, and the visit ends when the least engaged person runs out of patience.
So the plan is built around reconvergence rather than a single route: bright, high-pull zones deep enough in the floor that reaching them passes the errand categories, clear sightlines so a separated group can see each other across the store, and somewhere to sit for the adult who is not shopping. Seating in a value store is not hospitality — it is a merchandising decision that buys the errand shopper another ten minutes.
The store
