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An OMY creative vending machine is now installed at Gare de Lyon, in Hall 2, in partnership with Selecta.
Two huge eyes, white and black, set on a bright blue cube. A smile underneath. All of it planted in Hall 2 of Gare de Lyon, under the glass roof, between a Starbucks and a perfectly ordinary snack machine, black, rectangular, invisible.
The contrast is striking. On one side, the machine nobody has looked at in thirty years. On the other, a blue character staring at you, covered in badges: CREATIVE KIT !, CADEAUX, CREATE & GO, ACTIVITÉS À EMPORTER, and Paris, Lyon, Marseille stickers stuck on its sides.
Behind the glass, no soda cans or chocolate bars: coloring kits, sheets of nail stickers, temporary tattoos, sticker pouches piled up like candy. A numeric keypad on the side, and this invitation spelled out in full: FAITES VOTRE CHOIX !
Travelers stop. Suitcase in hand, backpack on their shoulders, they plant themselves in front of the glass long enough to work out what they're looking at. Some walk away with a sheet of stickers before their platform has even been displayed.
A Machine That Looks Back at You
A station hall is a visually saturated yet terribly uniform environment: screens, signs, newsstand windows, vending machines. Everything is designed to be walked through without being seen.
The OMY machine goes against the grain with one very simple detail: it has a face. Two big round eyes set on top of the cabinet, a smile, and a gaze that follows travelers through the hall. The effect is so clear that the brand made it the subject of a video of its own: “crazy eye contact at Gare de Lyon, what do I do?” A vending machine, you walk past without seeing. A face staring at you, much harder.
The rest follows the same logic of deliberate offbeat contrast: the bold blue, the comic-book-style badges, the city stickers stuck on like on an old suitcase. The machine borrows familiar codes, the familiar format, the self-service gesture, the numbered keypad, to deliver something nobody associates with this object.
The journey comes down to four steps: spot the blue vending machine in Hall 2, choose your activity, confirm your order, pick up the product. No queue, no checkout, no aisle to explore. Only a few seconds separate spotting the machine from walking away with your activity in hand.
Kidult: Creativity Is No Longer a Matter of Age
Installing a creative object in a train station wouldn't have made the same sense ten years ago. In the meantime, a deep-rooted movement has reshuffled the deck: adults have reclaimed play, coloring, collections and everything once thought reserved for childhood.
This phenomenon has a name, with two spellings that coexist in French: we speak of kidult, or kidulte, sometimes written kiddult. Behind the blend of “kid” and “adult” lies a very concrete economic reality. According to analyses of the French toy market, kidults accounted for 29% of annual sales in 2024, around 1.3 billion euros, and 40% of European adults said they had bought a toy for themselves in 2023.
Why High-Traffic Places
Kidults no longer hide, but they don't plan ahead either. They don't get up in the morning telling themselves they'll buy a coloring page: they come across one, at a moment when they're free.
A train station is exactly that, a suspended time when we're momentarily excused from productivity, and allow ourselves what we wouldn't allow ourselves at the office. It's the best place in the world to run into a creative brand, provided it's there.
The Train, the Ideal Setting for a Screen-Free Break
The first benefit, though, is immediately practical. A train ride is long, motionless time in a shared space where you can't run, sprawl out or make noise. For a child, that combination is demanding. For an adult, it is simply empty.
There's that very specific moment, on the platform, when you realize you've planned everything except the essential: something to occupy the next three hours. The sandwich is bought, the water bottles too, but the activity bag stayed on the hallway table.
The phone remains the default solution, and it works. But a journey spent entirely in front of a screen often leaves everyone more tired on arrival than at departure. A hands-on activity changes the nature of that time: it keeps hands busy, slows the pace, and depends on neither network, nor battery, nor sound.
What Works on a Train Tray Table
Three criteria make the difference. First, the format: the activity must fit in a small space and be put away in one move when the ticket inspector walks by. Second, the number of components: the fewer the better, and anything that involves scissors, glue or water ends up on the floor. Finally, easy pick-up, because a journey is fragmented by announcements and stops: a good travel activity can be interrupted mid-sentence and resumed ten minutes later without losing anything.
This is the grid that guided the selection installed at Gare de Lyon.
What the OMY Machine in Hall 2 Offers
Behind the glass, the assortment was designed as a creative first-aid kit for travel. It includes coloring kits in the colors of destinations (France, I Love Paris, Marseille), sheets of nail stickers, temporary tattoos and sticker pouches.
What they all have in common: a pocket-sized format, a rescue price, and zero preparation. You open, you color, you close. The goal isn't to reproduce the brand's full range, but to offer a condensed version that can be used right away on a train.
The principle sums up fairly well in the promise the brand made on its social networks: making five hours of train from Gare de Lyon feel like thirty minutes.
A Project Built by Many Hands
This vending machine is the result of close collaboration between the teams at OMY, Selecta and SNCF Retail & Connexions. Each brought their own piece: product selection and art direction on the OMY side, vending expertise on the Selecta side, detailed knowledge of passenger flows on the SNCF side.
The shared ambition fits in one sentence: making creativity accessible everywhere, even in the everyday places people pass through.
A Strategy Rolling Out from Hall to Terminal
This installation is not a trial run. It follows a first successful presence at Relay Lagardère Travel Retail, at Paris-Charles de Gaulle airport, where the brand installed its first dedicated displays.
Three places, three formats, one logic: go where people wait rather than waiting for them to come. The brand wants to keep offering original creative experiences as close as possible to travelers, and this collective adventure is only just beginning.
Updated on August 7, 2026