A growing—but still unusual—type of experiential opportunity in the licensing business involves properties and brands lending their names to hotels, bars, and other outdoor structures made entirely of ice. While collaborations in this space have been relatively few and far between to date, more ice structures in general are being built for recreational purposes in climates that are cold enough for such projects to remain viable for any significant period of time. This creates potential for partnerships with IPs that are a logical fit.
Some examples of icy initiatives to date:
- Just this month, Dior created a duplicate of its Avenue Montaigne flagship store in Paris, all in ice, at the Lake Songhua Seibu Prince Hotel, a ski resort in Jinling province, China. Inside the building are ice sculptures of various Dior designs, from couture dresses to bags. It also has a more traditional pop-up café and retail shop on site.
- Icehotel, a seasonal structure in the northern Swedish town of Jukkasjärvi, collaborates with artists each year to design a dozen unique “art suites” from ice and snow, in addition to its 15 to 20 “standard ice rooms.” Each artist or pair of artists designs a different suite, with concepts ranging from Dancers in the Dark by Tjåsa Gusfors and Patrick Dallard to Enclosed Space by Rob and Timsam Harding.
- In an early example in 2019, HBO Nordic and Lapland Hotels SnowVillage paired for a Game of Thrones-themed ice hotel in Kittilä, Lapland, Finland, with all the elaborately carved rooms themed to the TV and book series. The 20,000-square-meter SnowVillage consists of a hotel, bar, restaurant, and chapel, all made of ice, and features a different design each year.
- A number of ice bars appear on the patios or roofs of restaurants, bars, and hotels in cities with amenable weather, often sponsored by beverage brands. Montreal’s Riverside bar has an ice bar each year called Hiverside (hiver being the French word for winter), this year sponsored by Grey Goose and Cointreau. Similarly, BelAir Cantina in Brookfield, Wisconsin, a suburb of Milwaukee, has an ice bar sponsored by Don Julio and Ranch Water.
Ice bars, hotels, cafés, ice castles, and snow carvings are all increasingly popular in locations with long, cold, and snowy winters. While they will never replace theme park attractions, traveling exhibits, or other more traditional configurations as go-to experiential extensions for most licensors, they make sense for properties with applicable themes and/or positioning.
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