News
Gift card kiosk is 'beary' best
July 23, 2006
This article appeared in the Retail Self-Service Executive Summary, Summer 2006.
One of the big winners at the 2006 KioskCom Excellence Awards was the Build-A-Bear Workshop gift card kiosk developed byNanonation. The device won awards for best kiosk in a retail environment, best transactional-kiosk application, and the "Best of the Best" award, which is based on the overall highest score.
Build-A-Bear operates more than 200 retail stores in the United States and Canada. Each location allows shoppers to create a stuffed animal that is completely their own, customizing the animal every step of the way. Customers pick the animal, watch it being stuffed, give it a name and take it home with a birth certificate.
Nanonation and Build-A-Bear first worked together on a revamp of Build-A-Bear's "Name Me" station software, which allows shoppers to personalize their new friends.
Since the entire concept of Build-A-Bear is based on customization, it was natural to allow customers to make their gift cards — not just their bears — uniquely their own. Most gift cards sit on a shelf or hang on a hook until a customer buys one and loads it. Here the kiosk offers a variety of colorful templates, each of which can be modified with custom text.
"Build-A-Bear is so successful because each customer can expect a personalized, fun experience from each store visit," said Brian Ardinger, vice president of business development for Nanonation. "The concept of the custom gift card kiosk came about as a way to extend the ability for a customer to personalize the experience — to change the look, message, even the amount on the card. Everything about the implementation matched and blended with the customer's expectation about Build-A-Bear — the enclosure, the images, the fonts."
Ardinger said the entire program took about 90 days to design, create and deploy — just in time to hit his client's pivotal deadline, the holiday shopping season.
"We knew exactly what we wanted from a design perspective," said Dave Watkins, application "engi-bear" for Build-A-Bear Workshop. "A guest needed to be able to select a gift card, ‘pawsonalize' it, and have it activated when they left the kiosk. Nanonation brought their expertise to the flow of the gift card kiosk application. They have a lot of experience in UI (user interface) design and were very helpful in making sure we had all of the bases covered."
Watkins said the program is still in pilot stage, with kiosks deployed in six stores. And Ardinger said the response at those six locations has been very positive.
"Customer acceptance has been great," he said. "During one of the first installations, we had people lining up to try it out as we were setting it up."
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