Three words are printed down the side of this booth, in gold, on red:
TWIST. STAMP. SWIPE.
Read them standing on the pavement and they are instructions for the machine. Read them anywhere else and they are instructions for a lipstick.
Here is our new collaboration with Dolce & Gabbana through our brand activation program.
Three words, two jobs
Twist the bullet up. Stamp it onto the centre of your lip. Swipe outward. That is how you put on a lipstick, and it is close enough to how you use a photo booth that nobody standing in front of this one had to think about it.
Most branded booths put the brand on the outside and the instructions somewhere else. A vinyl panel with the logo, then a small sign explaining insert, pose, collect. Two separate pieces of communication doing two separate jobs, one of them beautiful and one of them functional and usually a bit ugly.
Here there is only one. The instruction copy is the brand copy. You cannot tell which job it is doing, because it is doing both at once, and it never once sounds like a machine talking.
Look at the arrow above the print slot in these photos. It points down at the tray, which is the most mundane thing any graphic on a photo booth ever has to do. It is painted as a single gold brushstroke with a soft, loaded start and a thinning tail.
It is a swipe. The one piece of pure wayfinding on the entire cabinet is drawn in the gesture of the product.
That is the level of care that separates a booth a brand put its logo on from a booth a brand actually designed. And none of it is expensive. It is just somebody deciding that the arrow was worth thinking about.
A guest on somebody else's sidewalk
The other reason this one is worth writing up is where it stood.
Dolce & Gabbana Beauty did not put this outside a Dolce & Gabbana store. It stood on the frontage of La La Land Kind Cafe in Los Angeles, a coffee shop, with the house's name in gold letters above it and the cafe's own counter running inside.
That is a different job from every other activation we have published. Our booth for Caffè Guess was in a Guess café. Our MCM work was in an MCM pop-up. Jimmy Choo was on a retail floor that had invited them in. In every one of those, the brand had the keys.
Here, D&G is the guest. Somebody else's regulars are coming for their usual flat white and finding a fashion house parked by the door.
That changes what the booth is allowed to be. It has to be unmistakably Dolce & Gabbana, because the entire point of the exercise is that the house showed up. But it also has to be something a cafe would let sit outside its window for the duration, which means it cannot behave like it owns the pavement. It is a freestanding object with its own footprint, its own levelling feet and its own power, and it takes up exactly the space it takes up. If you want this level of thoughtfulness that our designers and our team puts into making sure your brand is represented correctly, reach out to us.
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What we built, and what we did not
This is our classic booth, finished for Dolce & Gabbana. The panels, the curtain, the header, the touchscreen journey and the strip design are all theirs. The cabinet underneath is ours, and it is the same cabinet that has been standing in bars and record stores and food halls all year.
We say that because the choice is the interesting part. A ground up build takes months and is the right answer when a booth is going to live somewhere for a long time or carry a launch on its own. For a short run activation on a borrowed frontage, months of fabrication is the wrong instrument. What you want is a machine that is already reliable, already tested, already levels itself on a real pavement, and then curtain and panel customization that let a design team put their entire identity on it.
The red is not the idea, by the way. Anybody can paint a booth red. The idea is what is written on it.
The strip
Three prints per session, into a brushed steel tray under that gold swipe.
The strip is red with DOLCE&GABBANA BEAUTY set vertically in gold beside a column of black and white portraits. Colour surround, monochrome photographs.
That inversion is doing something. Everything about this activation is saturated: the cabinet, the velvet, the flowers in the planters, the lipstick itself. Then the photograph of you is black and white, which is the one thing in the whole experience that does not shout, and it is the part you keep.
It also means the strip never fights the product. A colour portrait next to a red lipstick panel is two reds competing. A black and white portrait makes the only colour on the card the brand's.
Where this sits
This belongs with our beauty work: YSL Beauty during New York Fashion Week, Rare Beauty here in Los Angeles, and Wyn Beauty. Colour cosmetics are a good fit for a booth for an obvious reason: the product is on the face, and the booth photographs the face.
On placement it sits alongside Birkenstock in Boulder and H&M in Beverly Hills, both of which we ran on open pavement. Those two posts cover why the street works and how a booth is run out there, so this one does not repeat it.
Los Angeles keeps giving us the best version of this problem. Good weather, real street life, and a lot of rooms whose front doors are as interesting as their interiors.
Want one for a launch?
We run brand activations nationwide, finished to your identity down to the arrow above the print slot, and we place booths long term through our Venue Placement program with maintenance handled by us.
If your product has a gesture, tell us what it is. That is usually where the booth starts.
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