Byredo

The screen on the front of this booth said one thing before anybody got in:

Capture the present. Take home a memory.

That is the whole brief, written by the client, on their own machine. We have very rarely had a job explain itself that cleanly. Here is our newest project with Byredo through our brand activation program.

The fragrance you cannot photograph

Byredo released Future Memories at the end of July, composed by Quentin Bisch. The campaign asks a question: what do you choose today, to remember tomorrow.

Here is the practical problem with launching a perfume, and it is a problem no other product category has. You cannot show it. A handbag photographs. A lipstick photographs. A pair of trainers photographs beautifully. A scent is invisible, it does not travel through a screen, and the only way anybody experiences it is by standing in the room where it is.

Which means a fragrance launch on a retail floor has a gap in it. Someone smells the thing, likes the thing, and then walks away with nothing to look at and nothing to post. The memory of a smell is famously the strongest kind there is and also the least shareable.

A photo booth closes that gap by handing the invisible thing a physical object. Not a photo of the bottle, which is an advert. A photo of the person, taken in the moment they encountered it, with the fragrance name printed underneath. That is the launch turned into something you can keep in a wallet.

That is a genuinely different job from the one a booth does at a fashion activation, and it is why this one was worth doing properly.

Two counters, two coasts

There were two of these, and they were identical.

One stood at the Byredo counter inside Bloomingdale's at 1000 Third Avenue, the 59th Street flagship in New York. The other stood at the Byredo counter inside Bloomingdale's at South Coast Plaza in Costa Mesa, in Orange County, about forty minutes down the coast from Los Angeles.

Same cabinet, same finish, same curtain, same screen, same strip. Photograph one, tell somebody it is the other, and they have no way of knowing.

Both opened on 28 August. The Costa Mesa booth came out on 6 September. The New York booth stayed until 16 September, roughly twice as long.

That asymmetry is worth noticing if you are planning something similar. A two city activation is very rarely two equal halves. Floor space gets negotiated store by store, and one location will almost always have a longer runway than the other. The longer residency is not a different experience. It is the same one, open for longer, which only holds true if the two objects really are the same object.

Built with complete collaboration, twice

Most of our brand work is our booth, finished for a brand. Curtains, panels, the touchscreen journey, the strip design. That covers an enormous amount of ground and it is the right answer most of the time.

This was not that. We got to build something together from the start.  

A handful of times a year a brand comes to us early enough, and with enough conviction, that we get to design the whole object from the ground up. No existing chassis, no standard footprint, no panel kit. It starts as a drawing of a thing that does not exist yet and ends as a booth that has never been built before and something that is purely unforgettable. That is what our Limited Edition work is, and it is the part of this job we like most. Our booth for Summer Fridays at Sephora in Times Square was made the same way, outer shell to touchscreen, every piece ours.

Byredo's identity is subtraction. The stencil cut wordmark with the breaks in the letters, the plain bottle, the beige, the absence of ornament. Nothing about the brand is decorated.

The cabinet is a warm off white, matte, sitting on its own plinth. The header carries the BYREDO stencil lit from behind, so the wordmark reads as light coming through a cut rather than a panel. The curtain is cream canvas on metal grommet rings, hung deliberately short so the legs of whoever is inside stay visible from the floor. The camera sits in a chrome bezel above an exterior screen running the launch loop. Inside: white walls, white seat, white floor. If this is the level of customization you want in your event, get in touch with us.

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Now look at the wide shots, at the booth and the Byredo counter beside it.

Same off white. Same stencil wordmark. Lit the same way, at the same height, in the same weight. The booth does not sit next to the counter. It reads as the counter continues, and then gets large enough to walk into.

That is the argument for building rather than finishing, and it is the whole point of this project. You cannot match a retail fixture that closely by choosing from customization options and applying them to an existing cabinet. The proportions have to be drawn to the counter. The header depth, the plinth height, the tone of the white, the exact scale of the wordmark: all of it is a decision made before anything is cut, because after it is cut, it is a booth in a beauty hall rather than a piece of the beauty hall.

On a floor where every neighbouring brand is fighting with black lacquer, mirrored glass and backlit acrylic, the one thing with nothing on it is the one you look at. That only works if it is credible, and credible means built.

And then we built it twice, to a tolerance where nobody in either store could tell you which coast they were standing on.

The blank line

The strip is where this stops being a very good object and starts being a good idea, a great moment, an unforgettable memory.

Two portraits, stacked, printed twice so there is one to keep and one to give away. BYREDO at the top. FUTURE MEMORIES, EAU DE PARFUM at the bottom.

And between the logo and the first photo, this:

TODAY I CHOOSE TO and then a ruled line, left empty.

The campaign asked what you choose today to remember tomorrow. The strip does not answer that. It hands you the first half of the sentence and stops.

Nobody was standing there with a pen. There was no prompt card, no instruction, no staff member asking you to fill it in. The line is just there, unfinished, in your hand, and you work out what it is for on the way to the escalator.

That restraint is the reason it lands. A prompt you are told to complete is homework. A blank line you noticed yourself is an invitation. And unlike almost everything else that comes out of a photo booth, this one is not finished when the print is. It finishes later, somewhere else, if the person decides it should.

For a fragrance built around the idea that the present becomes memory, that is about as close to a literal object as you could make.

Where this sits

Bloomingdale's is familiar ground. Our Versace residency ran for two months in the New York flagship, and the Jimmy Choo activation was in a Bloomingdale's too. What is new here is the department rather than the retailer. Fashion floors and beauty floors behave differently: beauty runs on samples, consultations and people who came in to try something rather than to buy it, which means longer dwell and a much softer reason to stop.

On the beauty side it belongs with our work for YSL Beauty and Rare Beauty in Los Angeles, though both of those were built for an event. This one lived on a working retail floor for a whole week with no event around it, closer in shape to our booth at Printemps on Wall Street.

Want one built?

We design and build photo booths from the ground up for brands who want the object itself to be theirs, run them as brand activations nationwide. If you want them permanently, we place them long term through our Venue Placement program with maintenance handled by us.

If you are launching something people cannot photograph, tell us about it. That is the interesting version of this problem.

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