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Project Overview

The L'Oreal Paris Powder Room is a pop-up Brand Experience open to the general public to learn about and interact with an extensive range of L'Oreal Paris Products. Trained staff offer lip, nail, hair and skin consultations and touch-ups to an eager audience who learn about techniques and colour trends as part of L'Oreal Paris' annual sponsorship of the L'Oreal Melbourne Fashion Festival (LMFF).
The L'Oreal Paris Powder Room is an institution for many of the consumers that attend. As the welcome beacon to LMFF it acts as the perfect ’touch-up gateway’ for Melbourne’s Fashionistas attending the nightly parades as part of this premiere fashion event. Many consumers often queue for hours to get the opportunity to learn more about their favourite L’Oreal products, get their nails painted, lips touched-up and walk away with the highly sort-after gift bag.
In 2012, we wanted to enhance the Powder Room concept by creating more Of a L’Oreal pop-up style store in taking the space from a temporary structure feel to a highly designed fit-out with large windows, LED coloured doors and windows and beautiful product displays and merchandising throughout.

Project Commissioner

L'Oreal Paris

Project Creator

CarrSpace

Team

Creative Director - Tyson Carr
Executive Producer - Madeleine Preece
Producer - Tanya Singleton
Associate Designer - Rebecca Gennard

Project Brief

Over the last 10 years the L'Oreal Paris Powder Room has become a favourite part of events like the Melbourne Cup Carnival and now the L'Oreal Melbourne Fashion Festival. In 2012 it was up to CarrSpace to design an experience that demonstrates the creative direction and meets the brand experience requirements set by L'Oreal Paris. This year's directive of 'Pop Colour' was exciting, as we had seen colour on the runways from Europe and it was sure to be emulated at the Melbourne Fashion Festival in 2012. The heritage of the L'Oreal Paris brand is one of understated elegance, so we had to walk a fine line respecting the brands white and silver, gold and black roots whilst injecting this colour trend.

With a prime location on Harbour Esplanade, Docklands it goes without saying we needed to capitalise on this location for our client. The dynamic colour changing LED doors, windows and logos were designed to highlight the Powder Room opportunity for the broader public, sharing the ‘Pop Colour’ creative and welcoming all of Melbourne, not just those attending LMFF, to the L’Oreal Paris Powder Room.

Project Need

The L'Oreal Paris Powder Room offers consumers the chance to learn about and interact with an extensive range of L'Oreal Paris Products in a purpose designed facility with trained staff. The general public had the opportunity to learn about techniques and colour trends from back stage of the L'Oreal Melbourne Fashion Festival created by L'Oreal Paris Make-up Director Rae Morris.

Like the changing designers across the catwalks of the festival, we wanted to create a sense of trends, evolution and support the digital strategies of our client L'Oreal Paris. Using the LED lighting we integrated colour changing signage, windows and door frames to create a sense of movement, pop-colour and excitement. As the structure is integrated into the large LMFF LED screen broadcasting footage from the fashion parades inside the venue, CarrSpace clad the screen surround in the same materials as the L'Oreal Paris Powder Room to expand the impact of the facade substantially.

This facade was designed to create impact day and night through a matt black on gloss black pattern that distorts light reflection like a chandelier. This creates movement and ensures no logo reflections from surrounding buildings.

Design Challenge

Firstly, a tough crowd. We have the most fashionable, design-focussed audience in attendance, along with a global cosmetics client that is constantly raising the creative bar. Staying fresh and current is an annual challenge when desiging the L'Oreal Paris Powder Room as it gets better every year and it continues to amaze it’s loyal regular and new audiences with it’s trend - leading designs.

Secondly, with the rise of digital marketing and social media we had to ensure that all aspects of the L'Oreal Paris sponsorship was branded consistently and accurately(as they had a logo change at the end of 2011) to ensure every sponsorship opportunity was maximised. This requires a keen eye for detail, art direction, style and brand consistency so that every Blogger's shot, Facebook photo and Youtube video has the L'Oreal Paris brand executed perfectly.

Thirdly, whilst executing great aesthetics for the brand experience, we have to balance the functionality of a facility that is visited by almost 1000 people per day. Storage, traffic flow, waste disposal, crowd management, comfort, safety and security are imperative for staff and guests.

Sustainability

Through the use of hired wall flats, flooring, roofing, framing and weights, about 80% of the Powder Rooms structure is assembled from reusable items. Our builders reuse these elements across many other corporate hospitality events in Melbourne each year, helping to minimise the land-fill from such temporary builds.

All of the assets (nail bars, cosmetic counters, nail polish display units) within the structure are owned by L'Oreal and reused each year across a variety of L’Oreal Paris activations.

The lighting is all LED, for its low-energy consumption and minimal heat output. LED lighting products allow for amazing colour variety and the colour-rotation effects used in the window, logos and door without the high-energy consumption of traditional coloured lighting.

Event Experience - Consumer

This award recognises the best design event for the general public and design consumers.
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