May 2019

Everyday Wonder

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magic In a world where every preference is collected and serviced in real time, what will happen to the thrill of discovery?

The world of big-data and real-time personalization turned digital into a quiet curator of our life. But with each tailor-made playlist and fashion look, our desire for the unexpected grows more insatiable.

Sometimes we need to break the algorithm. Disrupt the ordinary into extraordinary.

Retail spaces of tomorrow will offer an escape from the pristinely-curated digital flatlands and give exploration back to the consumer.

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Today’s consumer is adept in trading data in exchange for personalization, hyper-speed and the access to sharing economy.

Digital natives expect services to be customized just for them. Spotify’s Discover Weekly playlists are algorithmically created based on listening history. The Care/of subscriptions supply users with bespoke vitamin plans based on their health concerns and goals. Both of these services provide suggestive discovery based on collected data. The experience is mostly flawless, bringing exploration to your fingertips.

UNFILTERED RETAIL

ADIDAS KNIT FOR YOU ADDS THE HUMAN CRAFT TO THE LIVE PERSONALIZATION EXPERIENCE.—IMAGES BY YOUNG KIM

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On paper, this sounds great, but in reality, the new generations are already moving forward. A recent article in the Atlantic posits that digital natives are abandoning the bubbly, perfectly-composed Instagram aesthetic, instead, seeing the value in flaws of the real unfiltered world.

Data is a tool. It supplies consumers with bespoke products and services, fit to their specifications. Brands are benefiting from big data by learning more about what customers expect. But what about disrupting these expectations?

The store can build around the cast left by big data and expose the customer to the unpredictable magic of the real world.

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Millennials and Gen Z are hyper-aware that companies are targeting their e-wallets by speaking to their values and beliefs. Unsurprisingly, this is raising some hairs. The dialogue around separating the artist from the art isn’t isolated to scandals of powerful people doing bad things. Brands are just as deserving of criticism for the disingenuous treatment of social concerns.

Brands have always represented more than the products they release. They can be cultural icons, providing shelter for sub-cultures to find representation in something ownable. Fashion brands specifically have a wrought history of revealing their own political leanings as a way of reaching out to like-minded consumers.

THE STOREAS A CONVERSATION

L’OCCITANE STORE IMMEDIATELY IMMERSES GUESTS INTO THE PROVENCAL SOUL OF THE BRAND THROUGH ALL THE SENSES.—BY FUTUREBRAND UXUS IMAGES BY MICHAEL FRANKE

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Surprisingly, the reduction of fashion brands to blatant signifiers of social beliefs was made strikingly clear in the 2016 United States presidential election. Cambridge Analytica, a political marketing firm charged with the misuse of nearly 90 million Facebook users’ data, was abusing the link of brand preferences with personality traits. At Business of Fashion’s 2018 VOICES summit, whistleblower Christopher Wylie, revealed how fashion preferences were used to unleash a battalion of political messaging.

Brand preference is not always a clear delineation of political leanings. But we can see how brands, like other visual symbols, are weighted with meaning. Nielsen, a market research company, released a global online study in 2015 unveiling that 72% of young buyers are willing to spend more with “companies who are committed to positive social and environmental impact.” The growing Gen Z market is investing in brands that align with their own values.

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The new retail space is an interface for authentic conversations between the brand and the consumer around shared beliefs.

It is a gathering space that brings together students of a brand’s school of thought.

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THE STOREAS MEDIA

Social media is reducing entire retail environments to 1080px squares. But this gesture is training spatial designers to rethink how to approach retail design. If a brand is looking to communicate their values and glean an emotional connection, what is the visual language that needs to be used?

RILEY ROSE IS A SOCIAL MEDIA PLAYGROUND FOR CONVERSATIONS AROUND ALL THINGS BEAUTY.—BY FUTUREBRAND UXUSIMAGES BY BRETT BEYER

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Because of globalization, visual symbols have the ability to bring people together. Emojis, a seemingly kitsch method of communication, is the new digitized global language.

Imagine someone in Amsterdam, another person in Seoul and another in Vancouver all looking at the same GIF or meme, they will all be able to extract roughly the same meaning. Who will ever look at that friendly eggplant the same?

Forgoing language, all of these people are able to decipher human experience because memes and GIF’s aren’t expressing just language, but emotion in a highly compressed form. These seemingly light-hearted symbols carry secrets of sociology. They are snapshots of culture.

Just like the GIFs or emojis, the store has to convey a brand’s purpose and personality in an instantly decodable way that speaks the language of the consumer.

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As customers move through the perfectly-curated digital flatlands, their craving for discovery becomes more difficult to satisfy.

The Instagrammable retail seemed successful at first, but today appears banal. Customers are looking for something deeper and more profound, something that tingles their imagination and connects them with the world and each other.

We call this everyday wonder – turning ordinary into extra-ordinary. Everyday wonder is about taking familiar things and transforming them into something new and unexpected. It can be achieved in many ways: capturing the beauty of the ephemeral; re-connecting customers with their senses, celebrating human connection through service artistry or engaging emotions through the power of art.

WONDEREVERYDAY

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For Tableau Copenhagen, Studio David Thulstrup designed a space of contrast that showcases the ephemerality of flowers. The sparse environment is made up of design components that are hyper-industrialized in comparison to the living objects.

The design of the store needs to frame and elevate the products as they change form, colour and perfume. Tableau questions what traditional retail can learn from a space that is active in nature.

Studio David Thulstrup

The beauty of the ephemeralTableau Copenhagen

IMAGES SUPPLIEDBY STUDIO DAVID THULSTRUP

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In Reykyavik, what was once an old fisherman’s house has been transformed into a sensorial concept store. Surprisingly, this simple structure is redefining the meaning of luxury. By selling items infused by the nature of Iceland there is a naturally enforced exclusivity.

Escape forthe sensesFischer

IMAGES SUPPLIEDBY NORDIC ANGAN

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The space incorporates a rotating roster of exhibitions and immersive installations. For DesignMarch 2019, the store invited fragrance brand Nordic Angan, to create an installation called Forest Shower. The piece pours a green scent-filled smoke over the visitor. The smoke is an intense aromatic distillation of the many fauna species unique to Iceland.

Fischer is “a rest station in the maze that is modern life with all of its distractions and aggressions.” Indeed, it is a departure from everything that seems modern and yet uncovers a contemporary sensation: the urge to connect with authenticity.

FischerNordin Angan

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The Buly 1803 stores are immersive environments that bring customers ona journey from the moment they enter. The apothecary fixtures, a singing bird and the elegant uniforms; all the elements are approachable while exhibiting a certain air of cultivated knowledge.

Although the designed space is theatrical in itself, the staff gently handle the objects and access products behind doors or inside drawers with a sense of choreography. Guests can have objects ornamented with calligraphy to add old-world personalization. The practice of creating rituals with their products is taught in the store, they inspire patience and carefulness in the care of the products. A tenderness to aspire to.

Service artistryBuly 1803

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The experience is luxurious in its presentation, and ultimately the service is a performance of the brand’s philosophy. The allure of the quiet elegance of the service staff is made more mysterious and desirable through their alchemical knowledge. They have a secret to tell, and you need to hear it.

Buly 1803

IMAGES SUPPLIED BY OFFICINE UNIVERSELLE BULY

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Escapism has its troubles, it forces us to question what in fact we’re escaping and whether distraction, in some cases, is defeat. However, the benefit of immersing ourselves in new and unexpected environments is that we can look back at reality with a fresh

perspective. When a brand invites the customer to escape, to bring them somewhere they never expected, it’s an invitation outside of the world we’ve all come too accustomed to.

The power of artSelfridges Radical Luxuries

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For Selfridges Radical Luxuries Campaign, it has been an exercise in investigating how luxury can go beyond traditional value systems.

The exhibition brought together big personalities in luxury like Louis Vuitton, Byredo and Loewe among others. Each brand took its own approach to the future of luxury by breeching topics from scarcity to time. An exploratory space that encouraged visitors to see these formidable brands in a new way. In creating installations that were focused more on narratives, the brand exposed themselves to the vulnerability of stepping out from behind commercial safety. Artistic expression becomes so much more aligned with emotional intuition than with value, or even taste.

Selfridges

IMAGES SUPPLIED BY SELFRIDGES—THE FLIPSIDE EXHIBITION, SELFRIDGES LONDON, APRIL – MAY 201

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An immersive environment can create emotional connections. Today’s consumer is jaded by the constant barrage of targeted marketing. Anything that challenges the common forms of sales tactics is examined with scrutiny to ensure that the intentions are genuine.

The consumer is tired of being fooled, but also straight up tired. This is where new spaces for exploration offer guests the perfect reprise. A place to explore the boundaries of entertainment and enrichment.

At Futurebrand UXUS we design environments that inspire customers to return to the role of explorer.

Spaces where visitors can find new territories that intervene in the pristine world of digital information.

By employing narrative storytelling, sensorial immersion and toying with the borders of reality, we can take the consumers somewhere they’ve never been. By disrupting the manicured experiences of algorithmic curators, we can bring out moments of excitement, confusion, inspiration and contemplation. Ultimately, we want to provoke emotion.

Now is the time to find what’s new — to be explorers of the unfound.

THE UNFOUNDEXPLORE

FutureBrand UXUS is a global pioneerin consumer experience design.

We connect brands and consumersemotionally by harnessing a psychologicalapproach to retail and hospitality design.

We create immersive consumer experiences that reimagine brand environments for some of the world’s leading companies.

www.futurebranduxus.com

© 2019 FUTUREBRAND UXUS