We built and opened a pop up restaurant in Stockholm. The British two starred Guide Michelin
Chef Michael Wignall and his team was in charged of the cooking. The restaurant, named DILL
(an anagram of
LIDL), was an immediate success. Celebrities and foodies crowded it.
What nobody knew was that ALL food that was used in the restaurant was bought at the
discount
food store Lidl, down to the smallest grain of salt.
The Brief
Lidl is a discount supermarket chain all over Europe. For years Lidl tried to convince Swedish
people about the quality in their products. But no one believed them. Low price and quality just
don't go together in Sweden which quite a few low price food chains have experienced.
Simply telling people that Lidl has high quality wasn't enough, we had to prove it. We realized
that in order to counter the prejudice, we had to prove the quality in real life. And we had to do
so without revealing that Lidl was actually behind the campaign.
How the final design was conceived
We built the pop up restaurant from scratch in an empty basement area and lots of the interior
was designed for this event only, mirroring the spartan, simple, minimalism of the Lidl stores..
The design was simple and rustic, just like the Lidls stores, i.e the champagne was stored in
wooden pallets direct from the stores, the Dill name sign was cut out of thick metal.
There was need for a chair to the guests but there wasn't any that fulfilled the criteria for Lidl. So
we designed our own chair - The Pop-UP chair was born.
Indication of how successful the outcome was in the market
When we revealed that Lidl was behind the restaurant foodies choked on their gourmet grub and
all media exploded. National news papers, blogs, even national television talked about this. Dill
became twitter subject of the day twice. Consideration tripled from 10% before the campaign to
33% after. Media reach was 24 million after 2 weeks, in a country with 9 million people. The
following 4 months was the most profitable since Lidls establishment in Sweden 10 years ago.
2013 ended the first profitable year for Lidl in Sweden ever. And the Pop up chair lives on, being
sold in designershops.
INGO,