Get your wallets and pocketbooks ready, Disney shoppers! After many months of refurbishment, remodeling, and retheming, the flagship merchandise superstore World of Disney has finally fully reopened at Disneyland Resort‘s Downtown Disney District, and it looks terrific in its finished state.
While Disney theme park enthusiasts were hesitant to embrace the store’s new brick-heavy decor, after learning more about the new theme designed to represent a former bus depot servicing Disney’s Grand Californian Hotel & Spa, I think the layout and architecture actually work really well. And beyond the surface-level aesthetic, there are plenty of hidden details and cool new effects to keep families and collectors busy and entertained while they browse World of Disney’s countless rows of products and apparel.
Watch the video below for a walkthrough of Disneyland Resort’s: newly-remodeled World of Disney:
During the World of Disney media preview event this morning, we were treated to a tour around the freshly-reworked shop by several different Walt Disney Imagineers and Disneyland Resort Cast Members, who clued us in to the design process and thought that went into the new concept.
“We wanted to really make it an experiential retail shopping experience,” said Stephanie Sakkab Colvin, Creative Producer at Walt Disney Imagineering. “Every guest will experience something different. We have enchanted posters that actually come alive with the store. They are constantly changing, and they’re all about the movies animators would have worked on. We have animator desks that are inspired by the desks the animators used to use. And they also used to draw on their desks, so we have sketches [on the counters]. We also have cork boards that the animators would have in their offices.”
Watch a video tour of the new World of Disney with Walt Disney Imagineers:
At the conclusion of the event, we were given a full hour to wander the store before it opened to the public, during which I had the opportunity to take a good number of nice pictures around World of Disney. Enjoy the gallery below!
