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By Root 678 0

Olympia was; and it is monumental, and prodigious, as the Olympia was. It, too, is a “theatrical” place, though of course its theatricality is a means to the end of getting people to buy things. The one was for grown-ups, the other is for kids. The Olympia was also a hopeless folly, while Toys “R” Us is wonderfully efficient, as befits the flagship institution of a $13 billion global enterprise. But perhaps the most striking difference is an evanescent one: Toys “R” Us is not only a store or a company, but a “brand”; and it exists in a world of brands, of which “Times Square” is very much one.

THE CORPORATE OFFICE of Toys “R” Us is situated in an office park just off an exit ramp in suburban New Jersey, about forty-five minutes from the Toy Center of the Universe. The headquarters is a bright, sunny, boxy glass building with toys and stuffed animals on landings and in open spaces. It feels like a pleasant place to work. On the top floor is the office of John Eyler, the company’s chairman and CEO. Eyler is a blond, square-jawed corporate executive with an earnest, straightforward manner and a basso profundo voice. He is a native of Washington State, a graduate of the Harvard Business School, a career retailer. Before he ran Toys “R” Us, he was CEO of F.A.O. Schwarz, which was the biggest toy retailer in the world in the day when the toy industry consisted largely of small family-owned stores. Toys “R” Us was part of the new world that had eclipsed F.A.O. Schwarz. It was a publicly owned firm that sold inexpensive toys in giant supermarkets, a ubiquitous presence in suburban shopping malls, with 1,500 stores around the globe. But Toys “R” Us had, in turn, been eclipsed by Wal-Mart, which also sold toys as commodities, but sold them even cheaper. Toys “R” Us hired Eyler in 2000 with the hope of regaining the market share it had lost.

Eyler recognized that Toys “R” Us could not compete with Wal-Mart on price and instead needed to forge a new and distinctive identity, more service-oriented, more fun, more dramatic. Eyler and his team retrained salespeople, changed the layout of stores, forged exclusive relationships with prestigious suppliers like Steven Spielberg (himself a powerful brand name in the world of toys). But Eyler understood that he had to not only change Toys “R” Us but find a platform from which to proclaim those changes. Toys “R” Us needed a flagship store. “A flagship store,” Eyler said, when I visited him one very pleasant afternoon, “is important to serve as a tangible symbol of change, to be the ultimate example of what the strategy is when the strategy is fully articulated.” Eyler felt that the flagship store had to be in New York, since New York was where the media, the big buyers, the finance industry, and the nation’s largest toy fair were located. And Times Square was the obvious location. Eyler said, “We chose Times Square because it has evolved into the highest-energy location in the city. Times Square is increasingly becoming the crossroads of the world. It has become a family-friendly place, and we felt that we were a continuation of that trend.” Eyler understood that he could re-brand the company by associating with the brand that was the new Times Square: exciting, energetic, urbane, yet clean and family-friendly. And the effect was reciprocal, for he was, as he said, reinforcing the Times Square brand by virtue of joining it.

Eyler hired Joanne Newbold, a store designer who had created the F.A.O. branch stores during his tenure, to design the interior of the new store. And he told her: “I want to create new traditions for kids in New York City.” The new store would feel magical to children, as F.A.O. Schwarz does; it would also be designed so as to transport an unprecedented volume of customers efficiently through the vast space and toward the various selling areas. Newbold created an interior radically different from the bland, bright supermarkets Toys “R” Us had built all over the world: a vast, open cube, an almost raw space with theatrical lighting hung from catwalks, bright colors, a glass