UK department store, Selfridges, has launched The Fragrance Lab, at its flagship London store.
The Selfridges Fragrance Lab is an interactive experience allowing shoppers to create their own customised perfume as part of the brand’s six week Beauty Project campaign.
The new retail experiment is designed to show how customer habits, preferences, and tastes, as well as physical interaction, will be used in the future to develop personalised services and products.
According to Selfridges, in the future, browsing will disappear, making way for an alternative to both instore and online shopping.
The Fragrance Lab uses the consumer’s physical presence and responses to stimuli and questions to form the basis of an individualised fragrance.
This creates a more meaningful, multi-sensory, and customised consumer experience, where customers don’t choose from a product selection, but instead, the product is created to suit them.
The project is a collaboration between Selfridges; trend forecasting group, The Future Laboratory; and design studio, Campaign; and is housed at Selfridges’ London’s Concept Store – a space used for testing temporary retail concepts.
Customers are escorted through a series of interactive zones used to analyse their character, such as modern romanticist or flamboyant provocateur.
The journey takes around 15 minutes, with the Concept Store fitted out as laboratory and Selfridges assistants dressed in white lab coats.
For the first time, customers are able to go behind the iconic Selfridges store windows as part of the experience, while tablets are used by assistants to carry out a multiple choice questionnaire and picture personality test.
Following the questionnaire, customers are guided through a series of spaces by headphones to smell both pleasant and unpleasant scents, with coffee beans used to clear the nasal passages between each smell.
The end result is a Givaudan fragrance designed to capture the shopper’s individual experience at The Fragrance Lab, along with their character and personality.
Fragrance bottles are also tailored to the customer’s preference, with shoppers able to chose the shape, label, and language used to describe the scent.
Each fragrance comes with a ‘fragrance prescription’,outlining the key findings from their olfactive journey and how these influenced the final scent choice.
A booking is required for the full experience, which costs £65 and includes a 50ml bottle of the shopper’s signature scent, however, an express service is also on offer, whereby shoppers answer the tablet-based questionnaire only.
The Fragrance Lab will trade from May 1 to June 27.
