SK-II Popup
SK-II PopUP
REINVENTING A BEAUTY BRANd
Role: Experience Director
Circa: 2019
SK-II is global skin care line and the most profitable brand under Procter & Gamble. Yet the brand faces a few challenges:
1. Threat from disruptors like Glossier & Fenty Beauty.
2. Perceived as an old brand.
Together we set out to shift perceptions, reimagine the future of beauty industry and captivate a new generation of tech-savvy consumers. The answer: An empowering and experimental skin care journey backed by ambient technology.
Since SK-II doesn’t own its own shops, we took over a space in the heart of Tokyo where the majority of their audience naturally gathers. The intent of this temporary space was three-fold:
1. Allow full creative freedom to curate every moment of the guest journey.
2. Explore futuristic retail concepts with minimal impact to existing sales channels.
3. Use the popup as success case study to take back to SK-II distributors and demand more prominent shelf space in stores.
And so we began our creative journey and laid out the experience blueprint. We arrived at six experiential moments from an interactive skin consultation to a virtual scavenger hunt. With that we began our creative brainstorms to reimagine the beauty industry.
THE STORY
What IF
We invited our guests to an experiential space.
And
Curated a high-touch experience from arrival to departure.
What If
We made skin-care experiential and gamified.
AND
We used augmented reality to tell the brand story.
What if
Skin consultations were guided and private.
ANd
Highly intelligent and offered in multiple languages.
What If
The results are shared via an app in private.
What If
We reimagined product education and interaction.
AND
Made product interactions multi-dimensional.
What IF
We gamified the experience to increase time spent.
ThE OUTCOME
86% Lift in Brand Perception
2019 Gold ExpERIENCE DESIGN Award
THE PROCESS
We reimagined the future of retail within the confines and limitations that the business faced and pushed beyond our client and customers expectations. Over the course of four months, we took our wild ideas from sketches, journeys and prototypes, into the wild. We iterated and tested every step of the experience until the popup launched in Nov 2019. The artifacts below journal the experience intent and the customer & staff journeys.
