How Selfridges Found the Perfect First-Ever Christmas Partner in Disney

As is tradition, as soon as November hit, London began putting on its Christmas cloak. Starting with the West End lights and culminating in the Trafalgar Square tree, the city’s landmarks are one by one coming to life throughout the month. Today is Selfridges’s turn.

Christmas is so important at the iconic British department store that its creative teams usually start working on the year’s theme some time in April (I know, because I worked there between 2022 and 2023). This year, for the first time, the retailer is taking on a brand collaborator: Disney.

For the next two months, the windows of Selfridges stores in London, Manchester and Birmingham will be covered in Disney animations, while carrying bespoke products created in partnership between Selfridges, Disney and over 70 brand partners. The yellow bag will also be transformed for the first time since the store celebrated its centenary in 2009, while the London store’s façade will be the site of a light show – the biggest installation to feature on the store for over 50 years.

It’s quite a departure for a retailer that is famously loath to give up creative control. I spoke to Will Wyness, who after 12 years at various jobs within the creative department at Selfridges was recently promoted to creative director, and Sonia Samra, vice president of fashion and home at Disney, about the partnership.

Vogue: This is really exciting Will, it’s your first Christmas as creative director! And you’ve gone about it in a big way, enlisting Disney. Did you feel pressure to make your first Christmas big?

Will: It feels different. It’s a whole new way of working, and I got to do it with the best collaborators. There’s definitely a pressure in today’s world to figure out how to cut through the noise. There was a report out that says the average 18-year-old sees 10,000 marketing messages a day, which is really terrifying me and the team. We want to do things that genuinely, emotionally resonate with people.

In our office, many people are big fans of Disney. It’s been a big part of everyone’s life. We wanted to have a conversation where our worlds meet each other. I think you can see that across every layer of this partnership — from product through to the kind of overarching storytelling and marketing.

Will Wyness, creative director at Selfridges.

Photo: Courtesy of Selfridges

Vogue: Sonia, this isn’t the first time your company is playing in the fashion space — last season’s Coperni show in Disneyland comes to mind. But Disney is such a giant. What’s in it for you guys when you align with fashion?

Sonia: Most people’s memories will hark back to a film they’ve watched or a visit to the parks, but actually, the product is where everyday interactions happen. Our fashion business has grown significantly over the last six to eight years. Coperni is obviously the most recent collaboration, but there have also been projects with Gucci, Louboutin, Givenchy and many others.

There’s so much going on in the world, and I think Disney offers a playfulness and a nostalgia that allows people to escape. We want to connect with the consumer in different ways, and product is at the heart of that. This collaboration with Selfridges has been two years in the making. It wasn’t planned to follow Coperni, but it’s been a great follow-up.

Vogue: Tell me the story of this collaboration. How did it come about?

Will: Back in 2023, director of membership, experiences and partnerships Rebecca Warburton and I went on a trip to Los Angeles to see the Disney team, and they gave us an amazing tour of the parks and of Walt’s office. Then, we started talking about, well, what would we do together? Christmas is Selfridges’s biggest time of the year, so it felt like the best platform for us to be able to tell those Disney stories. We felt we could do something that people would definitely get out of the house for — which incidentally is how we often judge whether we take a project on or not.

Vogue: And this is the first time you take on a brand partner on this scale, across the Christmas windows, correct?

Will: Correct. It was a big decision for us internally, because we’ve never had a headline collaborator for Christmas. We’ve always done our own driven narrative. So this was a real first for us as a business and something that we thought long and hard about.

The word ‘collaboration’ gets bandied around a lot. Often, these kinds of projects are takeovers, where a brand puts its own messages on your store. But this has been genuinely collaborative from the very seed of the first idea of the narratives we chose. Disney has the biggest wealth of IP you can imagine, so we were able to choose from myriads of threads to pull on.

Vogue: Can you give me a preview?

Will: We leaned into lots of the British classics, like Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, 101 Dalmatians, and these inform the creative on everything from our windows to the façade to the product collaborations. Each of the 12 windows tells a different story using 12 bespoke illustrations that Disney has done especially for us. It’s the largest product collaboration we’ve ever done in our history, with over 70 brands involved.

Vogue: Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe you are the only retailer that creates product with brand partners based on the different themes that take over the store. How did that work this time around — working among three different brands for each product, instead of two?

Will: Yes, it’s unique to Selfridges. I think other multi-brand retailers generally will work with brands to do an exclusive colorway.

Sonia: On our side, we haven’t before worked with a retail brand to have this breadth of partnerships. Every big project at this scale comes with its complexities, but we didn’t want to stifle the creativity and we’ve been so aligned in the way that we work and the vision that we’re trying to create with Selfridges, that it’s actually made all the other partnerships much easier.

From a business perspective, the main thing we wanted to ensure was that our characters were being represented in the right way. So that’s the bit that often takes an education; getting a brand that wants to push the boundaries to remain true to the character. Would Winnie the Pooh do X, Y, Z, or would he not? That’s the bit that we’ve had to work on up front. But once they got it, it’s been incredible to see that journey of creativity and everyone adding their unique perspective to it.

Sonia Samra, VP, fashion, home and beauty, Disney consumer products EMEA at Disney.

Photo: Courtesy of Disney

Vogue: There is also a façade takeover. Can you tell me a little bit about that?

Will: We have done façade takeovers in the past, but in my time at Selfridges, it’s the largest one we’ve ever done. It spans from the center of the store, all the way to the eastern side of the store and wrapping up onto Duke Street. It tells the story of Tinker Bell. And then at the corner of Duke Street and Oxford Street is Sleeping Beauty’s castle. There are characters along the way and a sparkle that runs the whole length of the building.

With Disney, there’s such a clear culture of storytelling at the heart of the business that when you work with them, it’s imperative to always tell a story. I found that fascinating and a challenge. So we thought, ‘Well, we are in London, what Disney character would be here?’ — and it was Tinker Bell. Tinker Bell is flying over the skies of London, and she notices a gloomy mood and that the pedestrians seem weary, so she decides to drop her pixie dust over the streets. The idea is that this kind of magical world is dropped onto Selfridges and brought to life in the store. There’s a nice realism to that story. And hopefully, what we’ve done this Christmas will bring magic in all our other cities, too.

Vogue: How does this scheme express itself in Manchester and Birmingham?

Will: Several of the bespoke animations Disney has done for us are part of a series of campaign films. There’s a hero campaign film that follows this journey of Tinker Bell flying across the country and eventually landing on each of our (store) doors. And we’ve done bespoke versions of that campaign for Manchester and Birmingham. What’s incredible in terms of tapping into that local pride is that for the first time ever, our customers in Birmingham and Manchester are going to see their cities recreated by Disney animators. And each store has its own bespoke creative, as well as all the other experiences that you’d expect from a Selfridges Christmas.

Vogue: What does it take, in practice, to take over the Oxford Street façade with a light installation like this?

Will: To start with, you have to go through a very rigorous planning process with Westminster Council in terms of getting permission to interfere with a listed building. There are a lot of protections on what we can and can’t do. We had to get the creative right and really consider how it would play out across the building in a way that was sympathetic to our architecture as well as true to Disney’s standards.

We also worked with external production company Sculptivate, who 3D-scanned the entire façade to figure out what fixings needed to be created in order for the light show to be suspended onto the building.

Sonia: Especially when thinking about the castle, which is the main feature on the corner, and trying to directly replicate it — you can imagine the detailing it takes to build on that scale. The color representation, the uplighting, all of those elements were so carefully considered when designing. It was working hand in hand with our team in Paris, making sure that everything is being represented accurately, because you’ve got fans who are extremely passionate and notice every little detail.

Vogue: And finally, the famous Selfridges yellow bag is also being taken over for the first time in a while.

Will: We haven’t done a takeover of the yellow bag in my time, and we are very excited. We’ve done two bags. The first thing we tackled was the collaboration lock-up. How do we talk to Selfridges and Disney as a kind of partnership? And so, quite early on, we decided to drop the code and add the Mickey head. The smaller beauty bag has the two ears poking out the top of it; the bigger bags feature the bespoke artwork.

Sonia: Obviously, there are legalities to work out around that as well. Both brands are handing over their logos to kind of come together as one. So it’s incredible that we were able to get it over the line and it feels very special.