Four Months, One Toy Store and a Lot of Red

I'll be honest, I didn't fully know what I was signing up for. Hamleys is a name everyone recognizes, a toy store with a legacy that goes back over two centuries, now operating in India under Reliance Retail. I assumed the internship would mean a handful of social posts and maybe a poster here and there. What I actually walked into was a full campaign machine, one that never really stopped moving.

My first few days were spent just observing how the marketing and design teams operated. Every idea, no matter how small, had to eventually exist in a dozen different shapes: a poster for the store entrance, a story for Instagram, a banner for the website, a screen for the elevator lobby. Nothing lived in isolation. That realization shaped everything I did after.

Finding a way of working

Once I understood the scale of it, the real challenge became figuring out how to design for that many formats without losing my mind or diluting the idea. I settled into a rhythm that started with the campaign itself, not the format. Get the core idea locked, whether that was a festive offer, a new play zone opening, or a seasonal promotion, and only then start reshaping it outward.

Somewhere along the way this turned into an actual approach I kept returning to. Build the campaign first, let the format come later. Give every piece one clear visual anchor so the eye knows where to land. Keep the message legible in two seconds flat, because that's roughly how long anyone actually looks at a mall poster while walking past it. And design in a way that could stretch across print, digital, social and in-store without falling apart at any single stop.

It sounds obvious written out like this, but it took a fair number of rushed deadlines to actually internalize it.

Two audiences, one store

The trickiest part of Hamleys as a brand is that it's never really speaking to one person. A child sees the store first, colorful, playful, full of things that want to be touched. A parent sees it a beat later, and they're the one actually deciding whether to walk in, whether the offer is worth it, whether this stop fits into the rest of the day.

Every asset I touched had to hold both of those readings at once. This came through most clearly in the in-store work, things that existed physically inside the stores themselves rather than on a screen somewhere. A giraffe shaped height chart, price cards for the personalization counter, signature spot signage near the play areas. Playful enough to pull a kid in, clear enough for a parent to read the pricing without squinting.

The festive stretch

Then came the last few weeks of the internship, which is really where everything I'd learned got put to the test all at once. Christmas doesn't arrive gently in retail, it arrives as a flood. Letters to Santa, Santa's Meet and Greet, carnival games, Black Friday, loyalty cashback pushes, Red Card enrolments, all landing back-to-back, each needing its own identity while still feeling unmistakably like the same brand.

Letters to Santa is the one I keep coming back to. It wasn't just a poster with a Santa illustration on it, it was a small piece of storytelling, a sleigh cutting through a snowy night, paired with a scannable QR code that actually sent a personalized message back to whichever kid had written in. That little mechanic turned a static campaign into something that felt like an experience, and getting to help shape that felt different from just designing another asset.

Looking back at it

By the time the internship wrapped up, I'd put together assets across formats I hadn't even considered before walking in, LED displays, RCS banners, height charts, café creatives, festive campaigns, in-store signage. But more than the volume of work, what stayed with me was a shift in how I think about design itself.

Clarity isn't a nice-to-have in retail work, it's the entire job. If someone can't understand an offer while walking past it, nothing else about the design matters. A strong system will always outlast a single good idea, because the campaigns that held together best weren't the ones with one flashy visual, they were the ones where every format felt like part of the same family. And scalability has to be decided at the very start, not patched in later once you realize the poster doesn't fit the elevator screen.

Hamleys gave me four months that were fast, occasionally chaotic, and genuinely fun. It's shaped the way I approach every brief since.