On March 17, 2016, a presentation of quest-room which opened on March 5 in a special hall of Multiplex cinema took place at Prospekt shopping mall (Kyiv). This is an innovative project, by theme, by style and by location – the first intellectual quest in Ukraine, participants of which turn into special agents in a space limited to one room of the shopping mall.

Quest developer, Vzaperti Company, quest project partners, Multiplex cinema and Arricano Company managing the shopping mall pursue a common goal in the implemented project – to provide the guests with high-quality, interesting, involving and pleasant amusement. They are sure that quest-rooms in shopping malls, the format already popular in Europe, will have a rapid development in Ukraine too.

“Intellectual games attract active, lively, emotionally young audience; that’s why it is natural that the partnership in opening the quest-room will promote business development, bring pleasure to the guests and become another example of launching a new format in the entertainment industry,” notes the Marketing director of Arricano, Natalia Dmytrenko.

According to the in-house research carried out by Arricano, over 50% of shopping malls’ guests expect to get complex services at a shopping mall – to do shopping, have a pleasant and worthwhile time, have fun and visit food-court. The trend to visit a shopping mall as the third (after home and work) place for spending time with family becomes the basis for developing new formats meeting the visitors’ expectations.

“The last five years trend is the growing interest to game formats, gamification of all spheres of life. We are sure that quest is going to become a favourite form of entertainment for our guests,” says Mikhail Merkulov, the Director General of Arricano. “We want to be interesting and useful to our visitors; we are aimed at mutually advantageous partnership, that’s why we are developing, introducing the innovations, launching new formats and new projects with like-minded companies. At Prospekt shopping mall in 2016, the first shopping mall quest-room in Ukraine, the first art hypermarket in Ukraine Art Mart, the first beverages restaurant in Ukraine Big Berry, toys museum ‘Nostalgia 80s’ opened up at Prospekt shopping mall. This is our development strategy.”

Each new project and new format has its special history of creation, principles and approaches to business dealing ensuring the consumers’ interest.

Cofounder of Vzaperti Company, Vitaliy Beskrovnyi, among the reasons leading to launching a new “intellectual quest in one room” format in Ukraine, names the desire to involve more people into an interesting, educating, and informative game format, “Founders of Vzaperti project, before starting to work with quest rooms, carried out and plaid car quests. These quests have high entry threshold – they are intended for quite a small audience. While pondering how to make quests interesting for wider circle of people, we turned to the idea of a quest-room because anybody could play such kind of quest. It is already obvious that this kind of quest is gaining more and more popularity around the country. More rooms are opening; new quest formats are emerging causing the growth in number of people who like this kind of entertainment. We suppose that in time quest rooms can take a decent place among the amusement types, including those in the cinemas, bowling places, carting places, etc. Quests are allowing people to look at ordinary things from a different perspective. In order to get out of the room, it is necessary to understand the nature of many things, understand the connection between different objects, and, as the result, to thoroughly enjoy the right answer. People are going to have such kind of fun outside the room as well, inventing something, handling some problems of their own.”

The founder of Big Berry coffee house, Fly Park children’s entertainment centre and Nostalgia 80s toy museum, Vitaliy Ivanovich, remarks that in order to launch a new format, needs analysis, project life cycle calculation, employment of innovative technologies, approaches and practices are needed, “A new project idea is nurtured for a long time, sometimes, even more than a year. We assess the market and look at things which are desirable, important for the visitors. Each business has its own life cycle. For us, it is important to make our business remain pertinent both today and in 10 years. It is obvious that Big Berry will be trendy even in 10 years because we are the #1 coffee house, not only in Ukraine, but also in the world. Such range of beverages is nowhere to be found. This market is our blue ocean. The more so, as the tradition of drinking coffee, lemonades, shakes will last forever. Any business in entertainment segment is a short-term one. You constantly have to invest, add new features in order to keep the regular audience and attract new one. For Big Berry coffee house, new technology is the key factor. We have the most innovative equipment from Italian and American HoReCa market manufacturers. The price of one mixer for preparing shakes, for example, is over 30 ths. UAH. You can never achieve such effect in preparing beverages with an ordinary mixer. New technology is our everything. And the technologies show themselves in each detail, including the beverage cups made of costly paper; they are bright and just nice to hold in hand. The consumers appreciated it at once. And the most important thing is naturalness. Our products are of high quality, made of natural ingredients».

Arricano plans to go on implementing new formats, developing partnership business model, improving the service.