Danish toy brand Lego has opened a large-format store of about 4,000 square feet (about 372 square meters) at Phoenix Marketcity, a major shopping complex in the South Indian IT city of Bengaluru. Rather than simply displaying products, the store brings the experience of building and playing itself onto the sales floor, designed to draw in families, collectors, and toy enthusiasts. This approach - leaning fully into experiential retail for toys, a category shoppers want to touch and try, in a high-traffic mall location - offers Japanese toy, lifestyle-goods, and character-merchandise brands a reference point for location and store design when securing shelf space in India. Here is what happened, based on what has been confirmed through reporting.
According to Indian Retailer (September 1, 2026), Lego's new store is located in a retail unit on the Lower Ground Floor of Phoenix Marketcity in Bengaluru, spanning about 4,000 square feet. Within the building, it sits alongside international brands such as Next, Levi's, and Bose. The store is designed as a space where customers can actually handle building sets and themed collections, positioned as an interactive sales floor that offers creativity and "learning through play." The operating entity, the number of stores in India, and the investment amount were not disclosed in the reporting.
As urban disposable income grows in India, malls are shifting from being simply places to shop into places to spend a full day of experience. High-traffic malls like Phoenix Marketcity are adopting a strategy of anchoring large experiential stores to extend dwell time and foot traffic within the mall. Toys are products that children want to touch themselves and that parents need to be convinced of before buying - something hard to convey online alone. Lego's investment in experience through a large-format store can be read as a move to capture this "touch and choose" demand within malls.
This store uses its ample floor space to display building sets and themed collections, letting visitors build and play on the spot. The value of a toy lies not only in the appearance of the finished product but in the enjoyment of the building process itself. Whether a store can recreate that on the sales floor is what separates a successful experiential store from an unsuccessful one. Placing the store in a section alongside international brands also matters as a location decision for experiential categories, borrowing the mall's overall brand concentration to capture the foot traffic of affluent and middle-class shoppers.
Indian Retailer positions this opening as an experiential store in a high-traffic location, aimed at helping Lego reach a broader consumer base in India. The article emphasizes a sales-floor design built around "creativity and learning through play," without disclosing figures such as sales targets or the total number of stores nationwide. This account stops at the fact that a large experiential store has been placed in a high-traffic mall, without asserting reactions or outcomes beyond what has been disclosed.
Categories that customers want to touch and try - toys, lifestyle goods, character merchandise - work well as experiential physical stores even in an online-first market like India. Experiential flagship stores that let customers prototype and personalize on the spot are already increasing in major Indian cities for footwear and gadgets. For more detail, Converse's build-your-own-shoe sales floor at its largest store in the country, opened in Bengaluru and Nothing's product-personalization flagship store opened in Bengaluru are useful references. As for the approach of rolling out even small stores built around a "see and touch" experience across multiple locations, Livpure's small experience stores that example is easy to follow. Japanese brands have room to run experience stores in high-traffic malls to convey their brand world in parallel, rather than establishing online sales first as they might for export.
The trend of experiential large-format stores being valued as anchor tenants is strengthening not only in Bengaluru but across major Indian cities. Investment in "showcase stores," typified by the concept store in Noida, is tied to a structure in which malls favor experiential tenants to extend dwell time. When Japanese brands negotiate with malls, being able to demonstrate a contribution to foot traffic and circulation - not just sales per square foot - is increasingly becoming a condition. As a reference, New Balance's first concept store in India is also worth reviewing for its design.
Lego's large-format store is a typical example of capturing a high-experience-value category like toys through an experience store in a high-traffic mall. If Japanese toy, lifestyle-goods, or character brands want to move, the recommended first step is to build just one experiential sales floor in a single high-traffic mall in a major city before nationwide rollout, and measure customer reactions and the contribution to foot traffic on the ground. It is safer to move on to multi-location negotiations only after gathering that data.
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