Get ready to color your heart out because the Crayola Experience is coming to Chandler Fashion Center in summer 2019.
Crayola announced the new location on Tuesday morning, which will be the first Crayola Experience location in Arizona and the fifth location in the U.S. Other locations include Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Florida and Texas.
“Seven years ago we embarked on this mission of designing and building Crayola Experience,” said Victoria Lozano, senior vice president and general manager of Crayola attractions and retail at a press conference on Tuesday. “We’re very excited about this opportunity. Crayola Experience is a premier attraction where kids and families have hands-on, interactive experiences. It is uniquely Crayola, it’s all about color, imagination, our characters, and fun. It’s about creating family memories while experiencing creativity. Most of the attractions are inspired by Crayola’s products and technologies, which means they’re specifically designed and created for Crayola Experience and you cannot find them anywhere else.”
The 20,000-square-foot Crayola Experience in Chandler will feature 19 family-friendly activities for kids and parents to enjoy including turning yourself into a coloring page, name and wrap your very own Crayola crayon, and embark on a 4-D coloring adventure, located next to the food court with a colorful yellow exterior.
Chandler City Council members and representatives from Chandler Fashion Center were present to celebrate this joint partnership with Crayola. “For me, Crayola has always been synonymous with family, a lot of our first shared experiences are coloring with our family, and when we get older, the next experience we have is doing that with our children,” said Chandler vice mayor, Rene Lopez. “Chandler has always been known as a family-friendly community, and one of our priorities is always education, and we’re particularly glad that Crayola is here to emphasize that. So it’s going to be a great partnership moving forward. On behalf of the Mayor and the City Council, thank you for your confidence in Chandler, and we wish the Crayola Experience a great life here.”
Lozano said they conducted a lot of research around different markets in the United States, and felt the Phoenix-Metro area was great because of the number of families and children, and is family-friendly. “We just thought Chandler Fashion Center was a great fit for what we’re looking to do. We had a great working relationship with Macerich trying to bring this opportunity to life, and we think Chandler is a great community that we’re really looking forward to being a part of.”
Crayola Experience at Chandler Fashion Center will have some of the iconic attractions at other locations including naming and wrapping your own crayon, or melting your own crayons to make a keepsake. Lozano said they are also looking for new and exciting attractions to develop and bring in for the Chandler location. It will also have a retail store accessible to the public, with a large assortment of Crayola products, and unique products to Crayola Experience.
“The best part is when you get to open it, and you do the Grand Opening event,” Lozano said. “When you see the family interactions, kids having fun, all the pictures that are being taken when they’re here, that’s really the most rewarding part.”
