Sephora Scents to Live In

Art Direction, Web, Motion & Storyboard

Role: Art direction, Motion, Concept development

Program: After Effects, Illustrator, Photoshop

Duration: 12 months 2020

Deliverables: Paid media ads, Display ads, Organic social videos, Web, Email, Marketing photography

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OVERVIEW

We created a year round fragrance at Sephora campaign to increase consideration on existing customers who are new to our fragrance. Traditionally fragrance is associated with luxury, out of reach, non-relatable model / celebrity imagery. Our goal is to change this consumer perception and position fragrance at Sephora be approachable and part of your everyday life. We came up with four seasonal themed campaigns under an overarching concept of “Scents to Live In” by creating series of illustration and animation to position Sephora fragrance as approachable, relatable, fun to the customers.

IMPACT

Drove 1 billion impressions, US dotcom sales increased 63% from last year

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SPRING CAMPAIGN

For spring campaign, we designed 3 themes that are relatable to people’s everyday life: Staying In, Local Cafe, and Farmers’ Market. The idea is to make the fragrance feel approachable byhaving the products living in these themes with a series of animated characters and environments. My role in this project is to support the creative director with concept research, planning process, photo shoot, visual design, as well as directing the illustrator and animator.

concept

The idea was developed around experience of every day life with illustration and motion visual support. We believe it’s refreshing to the fragrance world, and approachable, fun, relatable to our customers. The team worked together to refine the idea to a solid concept with headline “Scents toLive In” and 3 themes; “Staying In”, “Local Cafe”, “Farmers’ Market”.

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Themes

We have dedicated assortment for each theme. For Staying In theme, we are featuring Gucci, Replica, YSL, and Aterlier Cologne. On selected bottle, we were able to shoot the images with cap off, and use this as an opportunity to add fun animation. The Replica perfume, because it's unisex, we purposely used a couple illustration to demonstrate it.

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‍Paid Media Ads

We did a new approach by “breaking the frame”. Camera pans over the scenes in multiple directions with element cues carrying from frame to frame. To tie all themes together, we made an opening & ending sequences cross all three animations. The visual started with a group shot with full assortment to prevent viewer scrolling fast and miss the content. We made sure to have the branding moment (logo) appeared in the first three secs of the ads. I worked closely with the illustrator and motion designer, provided direction and feedback along the process.

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SUMMER CAMPAIGN

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FALL CAMPAIGN

‍Facebook Instant Experience

This was first time we made Facebook Instant Experience asset. It was a fun experience to learn how this ad platform work. I researched examples done by other companies, and created an account for myself to play around the features and understand what are the possibilities and limitations. I made a storyboard visual and handed it to the motion designer. After I received first round of the video, I tested it on Facebook Instant Experience platform. Based on the test result, I provided feedback to the motion designer to ensure the final video work properly on the platform. See the third video down for full experience.

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HOLIDAY CAMPAIGN

PROBLEM

For holiday campaign, we had to leverage the overarching holiday concept and used the visual elements created by other team to achieve the idea of gifting fragrance at Sephora.

SOLUTION

I came up with the idea of using the visual element-hand passing a fragrance bottle through Sephora gift box and come out from the other side as another fragrance bottle. Each fragrance bottle has a gift tag showing the product information along with holiday festival stars, lights, and sparkles. My process is to start with collecting visual graphic elements and product photography, then putting together a storyboard with motion direction, and passing to the motion designer for animation. In the review process, I provided feedback and guidance to make sure messaging is accurate and visual is aligned with brand guideline.

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CHALLENGE

The motion designer we have been working with could not work on this project. I step in to build the animation myself. At the time, I have not worked on a full animation piece by myself. However, I took a chance and pulled it out successfully. The concept is to create a five days of fragrance–a digital advent calendar. Users come back each day to reveal a fragrance of the day and make a purchase either for themselves or as a gift.

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Gamified–Instagram Story Ad

The concept is to create a fragrance wishlist by showing a wide range of assortment and on the end frame user can tag / DM their wishlist to friends and families. I concept and animated the video.

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PROCESS

The complexity of the project and its timeline encouraged the team to be agile throughout the process.

After everyone aligned with the direction, we first started researching potential illustrator and animator. I pulled a list of independent artists whose works are more diverse in terms of characters skin colors, shape, gender because Sephora believes inclusivity.

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We planed photo shoot with rough illustration sketch overlay on the bottom, so we are clear on how we should position fragrance bottles to make sure they look good with final illustrations. For the photography plates, we captured full size product, full size + mini size products, juice, reflection and highlight. For photo retouching process, we made sure fragrance juice stay true to color and at same time be able to adjust opacity in order to make bottles look realistic in illustration environments.

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LEARNING

Throughout the whole process, my biggest take away in this project has been to learn to be agile throughout the process and connect different pieces (photo shoot, illustration, animation) together. A good designer not only be able to come up with a creative solution but more importantly is to be able to execute it by collaborating with multiple teams and make the process as smooth as possible.

Secondly, I discovered how to be detail oriented as project complexity increased.One small change can affect multiple teams and processes. It can be critical to understand detail and organization as the project scope increases.

Lastly, when giving feedback and summary to other people, I write it in a way with an assumption of this person has zero knowledge about the process. In this way, it ensures the message makes sense to everyone without doubt. Same thing applies to organizing folders, layers in working file, naming convention etc.

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