Retail & shopping centre
Shopping centre activations that pass centre management
Flat-packed, tool-free activation furniture built for short bump-in windows, tight service corridors and floors you are not allowed to drill. Designed and manufactured in Melbourne.
What centre management will actually ask you
Every shopping centre has a retail activation policy, and most of it comes down to the same handful of questions. How long is your bump-in. What is the footprint. What are you attaching to the floor. Who is carrying it through the service corridor. Can it be moved in a hurry if there is an incident.
Those questions decide what you can build far more than your creative deck does. A stand that needs two hours and a trolley of tools will be quoted differently, scheduled differently, and in some centres knocked back entirely. A setup that arrives flat, clicks together in twenty minutes and leaves no marks on the floor gets waved through.
That is the practical reason our furniture is tool-free and flat-packed, and it is worth understanding before you commission anything for a centre.
Five constraints worth designing around
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Bump-in and bump-out windows
Most centres give you a window outside trading hours, often very early morning, and it is shorter than you expect. Anything requiring assembly on site has to fit inside it including unloading. Tool-free assembly is not a gimmick here, it is the difference between one person and a crew.
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Floor loading and fixings
Centres rarely allow anything drilled, bolted or adhered to the floor. Freestanding, weighted and stable is the only safe assumption. Ours sit on locking castors so they hold position without a single fixing.
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Access route, not floor space
The tightest dimension is almost never the activation footprint. It is the service lift, the corridor door and the turning circle to get there. Flat-packed panels solve a problem that assembled furniture cannot.
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Storage between days
Multi-day activations often cannot leave a full setup on the floor overnight, and centre storage is small. Something that collapses back to flat panels can go in a cupboard; something that does not has to be trucked twice a day.
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Looking finished from every angle
A centre activation is seen in the round, from above on the upper level, and from behind while your staff work. Skirting to hide castors and a finished back panel matter more here than at a market stall.
Buying the range versus a custom build
If your activation is short, or you are testing a concept, the standard range is usually the right call. Our carts, counters and plinths are already sized for retail corridors, and adding your branding to a signage panel is inexpensive compared with fabricating something new.
A custom build makes sense once you are running the same activation in more than one centre, or when the product itself needs a specific fixture: a chilled well, a demo sink, a particular shelf pitch, a shape that only reads as your brand. Because everything is drawn in CAD and cut on our own CNC, a custom piece uses the same click-together system as the range. It packs the same way, survives the same handling, and can be re-skinned for the next campaign rather than thrown away.
Either way it is manufactured in Melbourne, so a late change to a colour or a panel is a conversation rather than a re-order from overseas.
Finishes, and which one to pick
Raw MDF is the cheapest and the fastest to produce. It suits activations where you are wrapping or vinyl-skinning the panels anyway, and it is the sensible choice if the campaign is one week long.
White satin laminate is the workhorse. It resists knocks and splashes, wipes clean, and looks the same on the last day as the first, which matters when the same unit tours several centres.
Two-pack paint is the premium option and the only one that will match a brand colour exactly. It takes longer to produce because it is sprayed and cured, so it needs to be in the plan early rather than added at the end.
Lead times run roughly one to two weeks for raw, two to three weeks for laminate and three to four weeks for painted. Selected pieces are held in stock and ship within three business days.
Pieces that work in a centre
Common questions
How quickly can a Clikt setup be assembled on site?
Most pieces click together in a few minutes each, with no tools. A typical three-piece activation is standing inside twenty minutes with one or two people, which fits comfortably inside a normal overnight bump-in window.
Do you deliver to shopping centres directly?
Yes. We deliver Australia-wide on palletised freight, and we can deliver to a centre dock by arrangement. Pickup from Melbourne is also available if you are running the bump-in yourself.
Can the furniture be branded?
Yes. Signage panels can be printed with your artwork, and two-pack paint can be matched to a brand colour. Send artwork as a vector file or a 300 DPI PNG with a transparent background.
Will it fit in a service lift?
Almost always, because it travels as flat panels rather than assembled furniture. The largest panel on a standard cart is well under the size of a typical service lift door. If you are working to a specific restriction, send us the dimensions and we will confirm before you order.
Can we reuse the same setup at another centre?
That is the point of the system. It packs back down to flat panels, so the same units can tour between centres and be stored between campaigns rather than skipped at the end of a run.
Planning a centre activation?
Tell us the centre, the dates and the footprint you have been given, and we will come back with a concept and a real price, including what can be pulled from stock and what needs to be made.