Projects: Guerlain’s Terrific Duty-Free Micro Shop

October 7, 2013 by Dave Haynes

guerlain1

We spent most of the last two weeks on a Hawaiian island (Molokai) that is so sleepy it doesn’t have a traffic light and the only retail chains around are Napa Auto Parts and Ace Hardware. It was awesome.

However, we had to start and end our first time in Hawaii in Honolulu, which is anything but sleepy. Traffic is as bad as any big city and Waikiki feels like Las Vegas without the casinos or drunks.

We did not spend much time shopping, but the earliest happy hour we could find was 2 PM (yay Yard House!), so we did wander into a very flashy mall called DFS Galleria, the DF presumably for Duty Free. Cosmetics has long been an early adopter for in-store digital and this multi-level mall was full of high-end cosmetics and fashion brands using screens to help drive awareness and experience.

The best use of LCDs I saw was, by a considerable margin, a shop for the French perfume house Guerlain.

It had a nice mosaic of screens filling the walls of the seating areas and an LED ticker running on the low ceiling, presumably for the pure visual effect. What was great was the content for a specific perfume line – which looked very much like it was designed for this specific medium. It was longish, but really, really nicely done.

I would love to see more companies invest the budget and time to really do content that fits the brand and the moment. Most of what I saw on the other shops was broadcast video shovelled on to this different medium.

The mall had some of the biggest 6 mm pixel pitch LED walls I’ve ever seen inside (save the Comcast Tower in Philly). They lined a main escalator bank and a wall at the head of it (see below).

dfs-lulu-led

 

Leave a comment