Mister Imagine's Toy Store allows imaginations to run wild by selling only plain cardboard boxes.

Welcome to Mister Imagine's Toy Store, where you'll find a giant castle, a music area, birdhouses, weather clouds, hot air balloons, and much more – all made out of cardboard. Oh, and that cardboard, those plain boxes - all for sale of course. The staff hosts workshops on how to create masterpieces out of ordinary cardboard. There's an augmented reality station in the store, where kids can hold up their bland boxes to the computer screen, and it will turn that box into a toy in the kids hands just to jump-start their imaginations. It's a car! It's a fort! It's a plane! It's Schrödinger's cat! Because we all remember how babies played with the box the expensive toy we bought came in, instead of with the toy. Energy BBDO and Xi (formerly Proximity Chicago) created this cool 1-week-only pop-up store in promotion of the Children's Museum exhibit, Unboxed – Adventures in Cardboard. Or as our PR lady quipped: "a unique out of the box experiential marketing tactic." ah ha ha, that pun is so bad I literally groaned, girlfriend. Points.

Mister Imagine’s Toy Store is open until October 21 and is located on 1371Milwaukee Ave. Take your kids there! Representatives from Chicago Children’s Museum speak about Chicago’s creativity crisis are in the shop and there are Art facilitators that help customers turn cardboard into amazing toys, so it sounds like fun.

ad agency: Energy BBDO and Xi

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Gloria Islas's picture

hey Mister Imagine's Toy Store is really impressive. Great place :)

AnonymousCoward The Third!'s picture

This is a great idea, I will have to show my kids.

Mr Magoo's picture

Nice idea. I would like to see how the AR worked. Make a case study.

Dabitch's picture
Dabitch's picture

By the way that I am getting this ad on this page is cracking me up.