Lidl’s Pop-Up Design Library

Lidl, the (in Europe) well-known no-frills discounter, is sponsoring Bulgaria’s One Design Week. The supermarket chain has installed a pop-up library that focuses specifically on design books.

For the third year in a row Lidl is sponsoring the festival for contemporary design and visual culture in Plovdiv. One of the festival’s main goals is to connect design to a broader audience. Following the festival theme “Can I help you?”, design professionals help the general audience to shorten the distance to the term design, opening up a conversation between designers and the people they serve — everyone. Lidl is not just sponsoring, but also providing content to the program.

The sponsorship is in line with earlier partnerships of Lidl in Bulgaria, like their support of the Sofia Film Festival and other cultural events. This proves Lidl’s aim to connect to new target group for the company — “a young and progressive audience”, in their words. The company understands that this group pays attention to every detail and will focus on functionality as much as overall experience. Therefore the no-frills attitude of the discounter is changing into a more design-savvy brand.

The main problem faced by Bulgarian designers is the fact they rarely find valuable design information at their schools, universities or any book stores and libraries. Bulgaria also lacks publishers who focus on design books or magazines. As a result, the Internet is often the only source of inspiration for them. To tackle this problem, as well as surprise their new target audience, Lidl will install a pop-up library for design books — the Design Bookery. It will first appear in Plovdiv for One Design Week’s opening day (June 10) until June 19th, then it will be transported to Sofia from 20th until the 25th of June. The installation consists of 100 contemporary books and magazines in the field of illustrations, graphic, product, interior and web design.