Retail styling and floral design Rainy Sunday
Location David Jones
Client Christian Dior Parfums
Luxury retail styling often involves working with international brands and their global guidelines to create local market brand activities. This was the case for our work with Christian Dior Parfums in their newly designed David Jones parfum store in Sydney.
This brief was for the launch of their spring campaign and it would be in store for 3 months. The global team at LVHM had supplied guidelines for the concept and it was our job, along with the local Christian Dior team, to bring these to life. The concept was all about the expressions of spring and flowers were a key component. Spring flowers needed to be used to highlight the notes of the new fragrances through colour.
Luxury retail styling brings with it some complexities that you often don’t get with other projects. The elements of your design and construct need to look beautiful for a long time. Pieces also need to be very durable and when you’re dealing with fresh flowers this can be tricky. Then to add a little bit more of a challenge – global concepts are often computer generated ideas that have never actually been made. Oh so easy!
To overcome these challenges, we spent a lot of time planning and testing our building techniques for this project. Testing things like how to get volume and shape with the floral elements. How to weight pieces so they don’t fall over. What glue to use so the luxury white paper doesn’t mark. Test, test, test. It’s the best approach when you are working on luxury retail styling.
With the testing done, we spent 3 weeks drying all the flowers. We used the good old fashioned ‘hang upside down’ technique and also silica gel for quick dehydration. Carnations are best done quickly and they work well with gel. The silica gel can also be dried out and re-used time and time again.
The building of the elements took about 3 days. We had to wear white gloves during construction of each piece to avoid marking the luxury white paper. White gloves on the job – that’s definitely a new one for us.
